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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.
The naming convention for DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 modules specifies either a maximum speed (e.g., DDR2-800) or a maximum bandwidth (e.g., PC2-6400). The speed rating (800) is not the maximum clock speed, but twice that (because of the doubled data rate). The specified bandwidth (6400) is the maximum megabytes transferred per second using a 64-bit width.
Some Xeon Phi processors support four-way hyper-threading, effectively quadrupling the number of threads. [1] Before the Coffee Lake architecture, most Xeon and all desktop and mobile Core i3 and i7 supported hyper-threading while only dual-core mobile i5's supported it.
In computing and computer science, a processor or processing unit is an electrical component (digital circuit) that performs operations on an external data source, usually memory or some other data stream. [1]
The number of levels in the memory hierarchy and the performance at each level has increased over time. The type of memory or storage components also change historically. [6] For example, the memory hierarchy of an Intel Haswell Mobile [7] processor circa 2013 is: Processor registers – the fastest possible access (usually 1 CPU cycle). A few ...
For example, an IBM PC with an Intel 80486 CPU running at 50 MHz will be about twice as fast (internally only) as one with the same CPU and memory running at 25 MHz, while the same will not be true for MIPS R4000 running at the same clock rate as the two are different processors that implement different architectures and microarchitectures ...
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.
Processor clock frequency has increased more rapidly than external memory speed, so cache memory is necessary if the processor is not to be delayed by slower external memory. The design of some processors has become complicated enough to be difficult to fully test, and this has caused problems at large cloud providers. [7]