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Diagram of a CPU memory cache operation. In computing, a cache (/ k æ ʃ / ⓘ KASH) [1] is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere.
A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. [1] A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations.
Cache hierarchy, or multi-level cache, is a memory architecture that uses a hierarchy of memory stores based on varying access speeds to cache data. Highly requested data is cached in high-speed access memory stores, allowing swifter access by central processing unit (CPU) cores.
These cache hits and misses contribute to the term average access time (AAT) also known as AMAT (average memory access time), which, as the name suggests, is the average time it takes to access the memory. This is one major metric for cache performance measurement, because this number becomes highly significant and critical as processor speed ...
Cache prefetching can be accomplished either by hardware or by software. [3]Hardware based prefetching is typically accomplished by having a dedicated hardware mechanism in the processor that watches the stream of instructions or data being requested by the executing program, recognizes the next few elements that the program might need based on this stream and prefetches into the processor's ...
Pages in the page cache modified after being brought in are called dirty pages. [5] Since non-dirty pages in the page cache have identical copies in secondary storage (e.g. hard disk drive or solid-state drive), discarding and reusing their space is much quicker than paging out application memory, and is often preferred over flushing the dirty pages into secondary storage and reusing their space.
Cache (computing), a technique used in computer storage for easier data access; Cache (biology) or hoarding, a food storing behavior of animals; Cache (archaeology), artifacts purposely buried in the ground; InterSystems Caché, a database management system from InterSystems
Illustration of cache coloring. Left is virtual memory spaces, center is the physical memory space, and right is the CPU cache.. A physically indexed CPU cache is designed such that addresses in adjacent physical memory blocks take different positions ("cache lines") in the cache, but this is not the case when it comes to virtual memory; when virtually adjacent but not physically adjacent ...