[ The PC Guide | Systems and Components Reference Guide | Motherboard and System Devices | System Cache | Function and Operation of the System Cache ]

How Caching Works

In the example in the previous section a loop was used to read characters from a file, store them in working memory, and then write them to the screen. The first time each of these instructions (read, store, write) is executed, it must be loaded from relatively slow system memory (assuming it is in memory, otherwise it must be read from the hard disk which is much, much slower even than the memory).

The cache is programmed (in hardware) to hold recently-accessed memory locations in case they are needed again. So each of these instructions will be saved in the cache after being loaded from memory the first time. The next time the processor wants to use the same instruction, it will check the cache first, see that the instruction it needs is there, and load it from cache instead of going to the slower system RAM. The number of instructions that can be buffered this way is a function of the size and design of the cache.

Let's suppose that our loop is going to process 1,000 characters and the cache is able to hold all three instructions in the loop (which sounds obvious, but isn't always, due to cache mapping techniques). This means that 999 of the 1,000 times these instructions are executed, they will be loaded from the cache, or 99.9% of the time. This is why caching is able to satisfy such a large percentage of requests for memory even though it has a capacity that is often less than 1% the size of the system RAM.

Next: Parts of the Level 2 Cache

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