2. Basics of Memory and Cache Part 2
Memory technologies vary significantly in access times and costs. The hierarchy of memory, from registers to magnetic disks, balances speed and cost, optimizing performance while managing budget constraints. Understanding locality of reference is key to designing effective memory hierarchies, allowing for efficient data retrieval and storage.
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What we have learnt
- Different memory types such as SRAM, DRAM, and magnetic disks exhibit varied performance and cost characteristics.
- The memory hierarchy is designed to balance speed and capacity against cost, utilizing principles of locality of reference.
- Cache memory serves as an intermediary to enhance CPU performance by storing frequently accessed data.
Key Concepts
- -- Memory Hierarchy
- A structure that organizes memory types to optimize performance, cost, and capacity, ranging from fast but costly SRAM to slow but inexpensive magnetic disks.
- -- Locality of Reference
- The principle that programs tend to access data and instructions in clusters, improving the efficiency of memory access.
- -- Cache Memory
- A small amount of fast memory located between the CPU and main memory, designed to reduce access times by storing frequently accessed data.
- -- Hit Ratio
- The fraction of memory accesses that result in cache hits, indicating the efficiency of the cache.
- -- Mapping Function
- A function that determines how main memory blocks are assigned to cache lines, such as direct mapping.
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