Caching (computing)

In computing, a cache /ˈkæʃ/ KASH, is a hardware or software component that stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation, or the duplicate of data stored elsewhere. A cache hit occurs when the requested data can be found in a cache, while a cache miss occurs when it cannot. Cache hits are served by reading data from the cache, which is faster than recomputing a result or reading from a slower data store; thus, the more requests can be served from the cache, the faster the system performs.

To be cost-effective and to enable efficient use of data, caches must be relatively small. Nevertheless, caches have proven themselves in many areas of computing because access patterns in typical computer applications exhibit the locality of reference. Moreover, access patterns exhibit temporal locality if data is requested again that has been recently requested already, while spatial locality refers to requests for data physically stored close to data that has been already requested.

There is an inherent trade-off between size and speed (given that a larger resource implies greater physical distances) but also a tradeoff between expensive, premium technologies (such as SRAM) vs cheaper, easily mass-produced commodities (such as DRAM or hard disks).

The buffering provided by a cache benefits both throughput and latency:

A larger resource incurs a significant latency for access – e.g. it can take hundreds of clock cycles for a modern 4 GHz processor to reach DRAM. This is mitigated by reading in large chunks, in the hope that subsequent reads will be from nearby locations. Prediction or explicit prefetching might also guess where future reads will come from and make requests ahead of time; if done correctly the latency is bypassed altogether.

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