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Concept
Cache hierarchy
Summary
Cache hierarchy, or multi-level caches, refers to a memory architecture that uses a hierarchy of memory stores based on varying access speeds to cache data. Highly requested data is cached in high-speed access memory stores, allowing swifter access by central processing unit (CPU) cores.
Cache hierarchy is a form and part of memory hierarchy and can be considered a form of tiered storage. This design was intended to allow CPU cores to process faster despite the memory latency of main memory access. Accessing main memory can act as a bottleneck for CPU core performance as the CPU waits for data, while making all of main memory high-speed may be prohibitively expensive. High-speed caches are a compromise allowing high-speed access to the data most-used by the CPU, permitting a faster CPU clock.
In the history of computer and electronic chip development, there was a period when increases in CPU speed outpaced the improvements in memory access speed. The gap between the speed of CPUs and memory meant that the CPU would often be idle. CPUs were increasingly capable of running and executing larger amounts of instructions in a given time, but the time needed to access data from main memory prevented programs from fully benefiting from this capability. This issue motivated the creation of memory models with higher access rates in order to realize the potential of faster processors.
This resulted in the concept of cache memory, first proposed by Maurice Wilkes, a British computer scientist at the University of Cambridge in 1965. He called such memory models "slave memory". Between roughly 1970 and 1990, papers and articles by Anant Agarwal, Alan Jay Smith, Mark D. Hill, Thomas R. Puzak, and others discussed better cache memory designs. The first cache memory models were implemented at the time, but even as researchers were investigating and proposing better designs, the need for faster memory models continued.
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