One of the greatest challenges facing the designers of many-core processors is resource contention. The chart below visually lays out the problem of resource contention, but for most of us the idea is ...

When shopping for a new CPU, you're likely to come across many different CPU specifications, such as cores, clock speed, TDP, ...

The year so far has been filled with news of Spectre and Meltdown. These exploits take advantage of features like speculative execution, and memory access timing. What they have in common is the fact ...

In the early days of computing, everything ran quite a bit slower than what we see today. This was not only because the computers' central processing units – CPUs – were slow, but also because ...

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers have a problem, a big problem in fact, Random Access Memory (RAM) is slow, too slow, it just can’t keep up. So they came up with a workaround and it is called cache ...

In the eighties, computer processors became faster and faster, while memory access times stagnated and hindered additional performance increases. Something had to be done to speed up memory access and ...

A processor cache is an area of high-speed memory that stores information near the processor. This helps make the processing of common instructions efficient and therefore speeds up computation time.

Why it matters: A RAM drive is traditionally conceived as a block of volatile memory "formatted" to be used as a secondary storage disk drive. RAM disks are extremely fast compared to HDDs or even ...