CS301: Computer Architecture

Watch this lecture on memory hierarchy design with caches. This lecture discusses the impact that memory operations have on overall processor performance and identifies different cache architectures that can improve overall processor performance. In the memory hierarchy, from top to bottom, there are: processor registers, cache, main memory, and secondary memory. The order goes from faster, smaller capacity, and higher cost to slower, higher capacity, and lower cost. Data moves from the main memory to cache. To do this requires a mapping from addresses in the main memory to cache addresses. How this is done affects performance. Performance analysis of cache and memory organization involves miss rate and miss penalty. Policies for reading, loading, fetching, replacing, and writing memory also affect cost and performance.