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Lecture 5: Caches, wrap up. Virtual Memory.

Lecture Summary

  • Wrap up Cache
  • Virtual Memory

Caches

Types of cache misses, ranged by the amount of delay caused:
  • Cache read miss from instruction cache
  • Cache read miss from data cache
  • Cache write miss to data cache
Reasons for cache misses:
  • Cold (compulsory) miss: Cache is empty
  • Capacity miss: Not enough space
  • Conflict miss: Enough space, a lot of conflicts (and thus replacements)
Common placement policies are:
  • Fully associative (M-way associative, if M blocks in total)
  • K-way associative: Each set fits K blocks
  • Direct mapped (1-way associative)
General Cache Organization:
  • B: Number of bytes in a cache line (typically 64)
  • E: Number of cache lines/blocks that combine to make up a set (typically 2^{0,1,2,3,4})
  • S: Number of sets that make up the cache
  • T: Total cache size
  • B * E * S = T

Case study: Adding the entries in an N-dimensional matrix

Accessing data with locality gives a huge speedup:
int sum_array_rows(int** a){
int i, j, sum = 0;
// Option 1: Accessed with locality
for (i = 0; i < M; i++)
for(j = 0; j < N; j++)
sum += a[i][j];
// Option 2: Accessed w/o locality
for (j = 0; j < N; j++)
for (i = 0; i < M; i++)
sum += a[i][j];
return sum;
}