Understanding CPU Caching and Performance

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Ars Technica is back with their latest editorial on CPU caching and the technology and benefits behind it. Feel like you could learn something - well check it out then: In order to really understand the role of caching in system design, it helps to think of the CPU and memory subsystem as operating on a consumer-producer (or client-server) model: the CPU consumes information provided to it by the hard disks and RAM, which act as producers. Driven by innovations in process technology and processor design, CPUs have increased their ability to consume at a significantly higher rate than the memory subsystem has increased its ability to produce. The problem is that CPU clock cycles have gotten shorter at a faster rate than memory and bus clock cycles, so the number of CPU clock cycles that the processor has to wait before main memory can fulfill its requests for data has increased. So with each CPU clockspeed increase, memory is getting further and further away from the CPU in terms of the number of CPU clock cycles. Read more...