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Understanding Cache in Computer Systems

Learn about the principle of locality, types of cache misses, virtual memory, page faults, and modern systems' memory hierarchies. Discover how cache design, size, and policies impact system performance.

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Understanding Cache in Computer Systems

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  1. Summary of caches: • The Principle of Locality: • Program likely to access a relatively small portion of the address space at any instant of time. • Temporal Locality: Locality in Time • Spatial Locality: Locality in Space • Three Major Categories of Cache Misses: • Compulsory Misses: sad facts of life. Example: cold start misses. • Conflict Misses: increase cache size and/or associativity. Nightmare Scenario: ping pong effect! • Capacity Misses: increase cache size • Cache Design Space • total size, block size, associativity • replacement policy • write-hit policy (write-through, write-back)

  2. Virtual Memory • Main memory can act as a cache for the secondary storage (disk) • Advantages: • illusion of having more physical memory • program relocation • protection

  3. Pages: virtual memory blocks • Page faults: the data is not in memory, retrieve it from disk • huge miss penalty, thus pages should be fairly large (e.g., 4KB) • reducing page faults is important (LRU is worth the price) • can handle the faults in software instead of hardware • using write-through is too expensive so we use writeback

  4. Page Tables Virtual page

  5. Page Tables • Each memory reference requires 2 memory accesses (why?)

  6. Making Address Translation Fast TLB • A cache for address translations: translation lookaside buffer

  7. Modern Systems • Very complicated memory systems:

  8. For each of these, where could the data be and how would we find it? • TLB hit • TLB miss • Virtual memory hit • Virtual memory miss • Cache hit • Cache miss

  9. Summary: Levels of the Memory Hierarchy Upper Level Capacity Access Time Cost Staging Xfer Unit faster CPU Registers 100s Bytes <10s ns Registers prog./compiler 1-8 bytes Instr. Operands Cache K Bytes 10-100 ns $.01-.001/bit Cache cache cntl 8-128 bytes Blocks Main Memory M Bytes 100ns-1us $.01-.001 Memory OS 512-4K bytes Pages Disk G Bytes ms 10 - 10 cents Disk -4 -3 user/operator Mbytes Files Larger Tape infinite sec-min 10 Tape Lower Level -6

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