System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers have a problem, a big problem in fact, Random Access Memory (RAM) is slow, too slow, it just can’t keep up. So they came up with a workaround and it is called cache ...

One of the greatest challenges facing the designers of many-core processors is resource contention. The chart below visually lays out the problem of resource contention, but for most of us the idea is ...

The year so far has been filled with news of Spectre and Meltdown. These exploits take advantage of features like speculative execution, and memory access timing. What they have in common is the fact ...

In the early days of computing, everything ran quite a bit slower than what we see today. This was not only because the computers' central processing units – CPUs – were slow, but also because ...

AMD's 7800X3D and 7950X3D CPUs reign supreme in the gaming realm, not solely due to their core count or clock speeds, but primarily owing to their abundant cache. CPU cache refers to a small yet ...

When talking about CPU specifications, in addition to clock speed and number of cores/threads, ' CPU cache memory ' is sometimes mentioned. Developer Gabriel G. Cunha explains what this CPU cache ...

Editor’s Note: Demand for increasing functionality and performance in systems designs continues to drive the need for more memory even as hardware engineers balance the dynamics of system capability, ...

Write-through: all cache memory writes are written to main memory, even if the data is retained in the cache, such as in the example in Figure 4.11. A cache line can be in two states – valid or ...

Scaling processing performance beyond the frequency and power envelope of single core systems has led to the emergence of multi-core clusters. Data access management within such processing systems ...