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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.
In computing, a cache control instruction is a hint embedded in the instruction stream of a processor intended to improve the performance of hardware caches, using foreknowledge of the memory access pattern supplied by the programmer or compiler. [1]
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.
In order to fully utilize the bandwidth of different types of memory such as caches and memory banks, few compilers or CPU architectures ensure perfectly strong ordering. [1] [5] Among the commonly used architectures, x86-64 processors have the strongest memory order, but may still defer memory store instructions until after memory load ...
Modern programming languages mainly assume two levels of memory, main memory and disk storage, though in assembly language and inline assemblers in languages such as C, registers can be directly accessed. Taking optimal advantage of the memory hierarchy requires the cooperation of programmers, hardware, and compilers (as well as underlying ...
The 3Cs group of cache misses can be extended to 4Cs when a multi-processor system with cache is involved, the fourth C being coherence misses. The coherence miss count is the number of memory accesses that miss because a cache line that would otherwise be present in the thread's cache has been invalidated by a write from another thread. [3]
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 ...
If all blocks in the higher level cache are also present in the lower level cache, then the lower level cache is said to be inclusive of the higher level cache. If the lower level cache contains only blocks that are not present in the higher level cache, then the lower level cache is said to be exclusive of the higher level cache. If the ...