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CPU time (or process time) is the amount of time that a central processing unit (CPU) was used for processing instructions of a computer program or operating system. CPU time is measured in clock ticks or seconds. Sometimes it is useful to convert CPU time into a percentage of the CPU capacity, giving the CPU usage.
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.
Volatile memory is computer memory that requires power to maintain the stored information. Most modern semiconductor volatile memory is either static RAM (SRAM) or dynamic RAM (DRAM). [a] DRAM dominates for desktop system memory. SRAM is used for CPU cache. SRAM is also found in small embedded systems requiring little memory.
The gap between processor speed and main memory speed has grown exponentially. Until 2001–05, CPU speed, as measured by clock frequency, grew annually by 55%, whereas memory speed only grew by 7%. [1] This problem is known as the memory wall. The motivation for a cache and its hierarchy is to bridge this speed gap and overcome the memory wall.
time (Unix) - can be used to determine the run time of a program, separately counting user time vs. system time, and CPU time vs. clock time. [1] timem (Unix) - can be used to determine the wall-clock time, CPU time, and CPU utilization similar to time (Unix) but supports numerous extensions.
This means that a CPU cannot simultaneously read an instruction and read or write data from or to the memory. In a computer using the Harvard architecture, the CPU can both read an instruction and perform a data memory access at the same time, [7] even without a cache.
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU). [ 1 ] Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output , it is typically fully occupied for the entire duration of the read or write operation, and is thus ...
An idle computer has a load number of 0 (the idle process is not counted). Each process using or waiting for CPU (the ready queue or run queue) increments the load number by 1. Each process that terminates decrements it by 1. Most UNIX systems count only processes in the running (on CPU) or runnable (waiting for CPU) states.
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