Systemlogic heeft het artikel "The Fundamentals Of Cache" online gezet. Caches worden steeds belangrijker voor de moderne datahongerige processors, die gevoed moeten worden door de relatief extreem trage RAM geheugenchips. Er is onder andere geschreven over verschillende technieken van cachen, de geschiedenis van caches en voorbeelden uit bestaande processors:
So enough already, you say, what's the bottom line? How is cache helping my framerate in Quake 3 Arena? Well, it turns out that there are still some more important concepts that we have to cover first. Firstly, there's a term in computer science / computer architecture known as locality of reference: Programs tend to reuse data and instructions they have used recently. A widely held rule of thumb is that a program spends [about] 90% of its execution time in only [about] 10% of the code (Hennessy and Patterson, 38). Well, if a processor is only using 10% of the code most of the time, why not keep that information really close to the processor so that it can get access to that information the fastest? That's exactly what cache is used for.
Een aanrader voor mensen die bij hun favoriete computershop de verkoper willen afbluffen met termen als "8-way Set Associative Cache" . Bedankt yam'ha voor de tip.