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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The dynamic interplay between processor speed and memory access times has rendered cache performance a critical determinant of computing efficiency. As modern systems increasingly rely on hierarchical ...

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 ...

The type of memory a designer selects for an embedded project drives overall system operation and performance, so obviously this is a very important decision. Whether the system runs on batteries or ...

The very first all-electronic memory was the Williams-Kilburn tube, developed in 1947 at Manchester University. It used a cathode ray tube to store bits as dots on the screen’s surface. The evolution ...

In the world of computing, one of the unexpected things to marvel at is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing in data centers. These and other forces are driving ...

The cost associated with moving data in and out of memory is becoming prohibitive, both in terms of performance and power, and it is being made worse by the data locality in algorithms, which limits ...