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Cache Performance Measurement And Metric
A CPU cache is a piece of hardware that reduces access time to data in memory by keeping some part of the frequently used data of the main memory in a 'cache' of smaller and faster memory. The performance of a computer system depends on the performance of all individual units—which include execution units like integer, branch and floating point, I/O units, bus, caches and memory systems. The gap between processor speed and main memory speed has grown exponentially. Until 2001–05, CPU speed, as measured by clock frequency, grew annually by 55%, whereas memory speed only grew by 7%. This problem is known as the memory wall. The motivation for a cache and its hierarchy is to bridge this speed gap and overcome the memory wall. The critical component in most high-performance computers is the cache. Since the cache exists to bridge the speed gap, its performance measurement and metrics are important in designing and choosing various parameters like cache size, associativity, replacem ...
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CPU Cache
A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations. Most CPUs have a hierarchy of multiple cache levels (L1, L2, often L3, and rarely even L4), with different instruction-specific and data-specific caches at level 1. The cache memory is typically implemented with static random-access memory (SRAM), in modern CPUs by far the largest part of them by chip area, but SRAM is not always used for all levels (of I- or D-cache), or even any level, sometimes some latter or all levels are implemented with eDRAM. Other types of caches exist (that are not counted towards the "cache size" of the most important caches mentioned above), such as the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) which is part of the memory management unit (M ...
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Average Memory Access Time
In computer science, Average Memory Access Time (AMAT) is a common metric to analyze computer memory system performance. Metric AMAT uses hit time, miss penalty, and miss rate to measure memory performance. It accounts for the fact that hits and misses affect memory system performance differently. In addition, AMAT can be extended recursively to multiple layers of the memory hierarchy. It focuses on how locality and cache misses affect overall performance and allows for a quick analysis of different cache design techniques. A tacit assumption A tacit assumption or implicit assumption is an assumption that underlies a logical argument, course of action, Decision-making, decision, or judgment that is not explicitly voiced nor necessarily understood by the decision maker or judge. These as ... of AMAT is that a data access is either a hit or a miss, meaning the memory only supports sequential accesses and cannot have multiple accesses occurring simultaneously. Recently AMAT has bee ...
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Cache Performance Measurement And Metric
A CPU cache is a piece of hardware that reduces access time to data in memory by keeping some part of the frequently used data of the main memory in a 'cache' of smaller and faster memory. The performance of a computer system depends on the performance of all individual units—which include execution units like integer, branch and floating point, I/O units, bus, caches and memory systems. The gap between processor speed and main memory speed has grown exponentially. Until 2001–05, CPU speed, as measured by clock frequency, grew annually by 55%, whereas memory speed only grew by 7%. This problem is known as the memory wall. The motivation for a cache and its hierarchy is to bridge this speed gap and overcome the memory wall. The critical component in most high-performance computers is the cache. Since the cache exists to bridge the speed gap, its performance measurement and metrics are important in designing and choosing various parameters like cache size, associativity, replacem ...
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Instruction Prefetch
Instruction or instructions may refer to: A specific direction or order given to someone to perform a task or carry out a procedure. They provide clear guidance on how to achieve a desired outcome. They can be written or verbal, and they typically include detailed steps or actions to follow. Instructions are crucial for ensuring tasks are completed correctly and efficiently. Computing * Instruction, one operation of a processor within a computer architecture instruction set * Computer program, a collection of instructions Music * Instruction (band), a 2002 rock band from New York City, US * "Instruction" (song), a 2017 song by English DJ Jax Jones * ''Instructions'' (album), a 2001 album by Jermaine Dupri Other uses * Instruction, teaching or education performed by a teacher * Sebayt, a work of the ancient Egyptian didactic literature aiming to teach ethical behaviour * Instruction, the pre-trial phase of an investigation led by a judge in an inquisitorial system of justice * I ...
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Locality Of Reference
In computer science, locality of reference, also known as the principle of locality, is the tendency of a processor to access the same set of memory locations repetitively over a short period of time. There are two basic types of reference locality temporal and spatial locality. Temporal locality refers to the reuse of specific data and/or resources within a relatively small time duration. Spatial locality (also termed ''data locality'')"NIST Big Data Interoperability Framework: Volume 1"urn:doi:10.6028/NIST.SP.1500-1r2 refers to the use of data elements within relatively close storage locations. Sequential locality, a special case of spatial locality, occurs when data elements are arranged and accessed linearly, such as traversing the elements in a one-dimensional Array data structure, array. Locality is a type of predictability, predictable behavior that occurs in computer systems. Systems which exhibit strong ''locality of reference'' are good candidates for performance optimiza ...
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Cache Coherence
In computer architecture, cache coherence is the uniformity of shared resource data that is stored in multiple local caches. In a cache coherent system, if multiple clients have a cached copy of the same region of a shared memory resource, all copies are the same. Without cache coherence, a change made to the region by one client may not be seen by others, and errors can result when the data used by different clients is mismatched. A cache coherence protocol is used to maintain cache coherency. The two main types are snooping and directory-based protocols. Cache coherence is of particular relevance in multiprocessing systems, where each CPU may have its own local cache of a shared memory resource. Overview In a shared memory multiprocessor system with a separate cache memory for each processor, it is possible to have many copies of shared data: one copy in the main memory and one in the local cache of each processor that requested it. When one of the copies of data is c ...
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Interrupt
In digital computers, an interrupt (sometimes referred to as a trap) is a request for the processor to ''interrupt'' currently executing code (when permitted), so that the event can be processed in a timely manner. If the request is accepted, the processor will suspend its current activities, save its state, and execute a function called an '' interrupt handler'' (or an ''interrupt service routine'', ISR) to deal with the event. This interruption is often temporary, allowing the software to resume normal activities after the interrupt handler finishes, although the interrupt could instead indicate a fatal error. Interrupts are commonly used by hardware devices to indicate electronic or physical state changes that require time-sensitive attention. Interrupts are also commonly used to implement computer multitasking and system calls, especially in real-time computing. Systems that use interrupts in these ways are said to be interrupt-driven. History Hardware interrupts wer ...
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Context Switch
In computing, a context switch is the process of storing the state of a process or thread, so that it can be restored and resume execution at a later point, and then restoring a different, previously saved, state. This allows multiple processes to share a single central processing unit (CPU), and is an essential feature of a multiprogramming or multitasking operating system. In a traditional CPU, each process – a program in execution – uses the various CPU registers to store data and hold the current state of the running process. However, in a multitasking operating system, the operating system switches between processes or threads to allow the execution of multiple processes simultaneously. For every switch, the operating system must save the state of the currently running process, followed by loading the next process state, which will run on the CPU. This sequence of operations that stores the state of the running process and loads the following running process is called a ...
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System Call
In computing, a system call (syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, accessing a hard disk drive or accessing the device's camera), creation and execution of new processes, and communication with integral kernel services such as process scheduling. System calls provide an essential interface between a process and the operating system. In most systems, system calls can only be made from userspace processes, while in some systems, OS/360 and successors for example, privileged system code also issues system calls. For embedded systems, system calls typically do not change the privilege mode of the CPU. Privileges The architecture of most modern processors, with the exception of some embedded systems, involves a security model. For example, the '' rings'' model specifies multiple privilege levels under which software may be e ...
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Instruction-level Parallelism
Instruction-level parallelism (ILP) is the parallel or simultaneous execution of a sequence of instructions in a computer program. More specifically, ILP refers to the average number of instructions run per step of this parallel execution. Discussion ILP must not be confused with concurrency. In ILP, there is a single specific thread of execution of a process. On the other hand, concurrency involves the assignment of multiple threads to a CPU's core in a strict alternation, or in true parallelism if there are enough CPU cores, ideally one core for each runnable thread. There are two approaches to instruction-level parallelism: hardware and software. Hardware-level ILP works upon dynamic parallelism, whereas software-level ILP works on static parallelism. Dynamic parallelism means that the processor decides at run time which instructions to execute in parallel, whereas static parallelism means the compiler decides which instructions to execute in parallel. The Pentium ...
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Memory-level Parallelism
In computer architecture, memory-level parallelism (MLP) is the ability to have pending multiple memory operations, in particular cache misses or translation lookaside buffer (TLB) misses, at the same time. In a single processor, MLP may be considered a form of instruction-level parallelism (ILP). However, ILP is often conflated with superscalar, the ability to execute more than one instruction at the same time, e.g. a processor such as the Intel Pentium Pro is five-way superscalar, with the ability to start executing five different microinstructions in a given cycle, but it can handle four different cache misses for up to 20 different load microinstructions at any time. It is possible to have a machine that is not superscalar but which nevertheless has high MLP. Arguably a machine that has no ILP, which is not superscalar, which executes one instruction at a time in a non-pipelined manner, but which performs hardware prefetching (not software instruction-level prefetching) exhi ...
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Power Law Of Cache Misses
A power law is a mathematical relationship between two quantities in which one is directly proportional to some power of the other. The power law for cache misses was first established by C. K. Chow in his 1974 paper, supported by experimental data on hit ratios for stack processing by Richard Mattson in 1971. The power law of cache misses can be used to narrow down the cache sizes to practical ranges, given a tolerable miss rate, as one of the early steps while designing the cache hierarchy for a uniprocessor system. The power law for cache misses can be stated as : M = M_0 C^ where ''M'' is the miss rate for a cache of size ''C'' and ''M''0 is the miss rate of a baseline cache. The exponent ''α'' is workload-specific and typically ranges from 0.3 to 0.7. Caveats The power law can only give an estimate of the miss rate only up to a certain value of cache size. A large enough cache eliminates capacity misses and increasing the cache size further will not reduce the miss rat ...
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