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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new AI-assisted tool that helps computer architects boost ...

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 ...

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, ...

The disk cache in OS X can sometimes use a fair amount of the system's RAM, and clearing it can help you figure out how much RAM your applications and system processes are using. Topher, an avid Mac ...