Computer Organization & Architecture · topic
Direct, set-associative and fully associative mapping, the tag, index and offset split, tag-memory size and lookup hardware, traced reference strings with LRU and FIFO, the three miss types, array traversal misses, write-through and write-back with allocation policies, and multilevel caches.
A cache is a small, fast memory between the processor and main memory that holds copies of recently used blocks (also called lines) of main memory. The processor sends every address to the cache first.
A cache holds far fewer blocks than main memory, so many memory blocks must share each cache location. The mapping function decides where a memory block may be placed, and therefore how the cache finds it again.
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