Memory Hierarchy

• Many programs have a high degree of locality in their accesses

  • spatial locality: accessing things nearby previous accesses
  • temporal locality: reusing an item that was previously accessed

on-chip cache

registers

datapath

control

processor

Second/Third level cache (SRAM)

Main memory

(DRAM)

Remote memory / Secondary storage (Disk)

Tertiary storage

(Disk/Tape)

Speed (ns): 1s 10s 100s 10s ms 10s sec

Size (bytes): 100s Ks Ms Gs Ts

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