System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers have a problem, a big problem in fact, Random Access Memory (RAM) is slow, too slow, it just can’t keep up. So they came up with a workaround and it is called cache ...

The year so far has been filled with news of Spectre and Meltdown. These exploits take advantage of features like speculative execution, and memory access timing. What they have in common is the fact ...

When talking about CPU specifications, in addition to clock speed and number of cores/threads, ' CPU cache memory ' is sometimes mentioned. Developer Gabriel G. Cunha explains what this CPU cache ...

In the eighties, computer processors became faster and faster, while memory access times stagnated and hindered additional performance increases. Something had to be done to speed up memory access and ...

A Cache-Only Memory Architecture design (COMA) may be a sort of Cache-Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access (CC- NUMA) design. not like in a very typical CC-NUMA design, in a COMA, each shared-memory ...

The past decade or so has seen some really phenomenal capacity growth and similarly remarkable software technology in support of distributed-memory systems. When work can be spread out across a lot of ...

Editor’s Note: Demand for increasing functionality and performance in systems designs continues to drive the need for more memory even as hardware engineers balance the dynamics of system capability, ...

Magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM) is a non-volatile memory technology that relies on the (relative) magnetization state of two ferromagnetic layers to store binary information. Throughout ...

The memory hierarchy (including caches and main memory) can consume as much as 50% of an embedded system power. This power is very application dependent, and tuning caches for a given application is a ...

Since the 2.0 kernel release, Linux has supported a large number of SMP systems based on a variety of CPUs. Linux has done an excellent job of abstracting differences among these CPUs, even in kernel ...