When talking about CPU specifications, in addition to clock speed and number of cores/threads, ' CPU cache memory ' is sometimes mentioned. Developer Gabriel G. Cunha explains what this CPU cache ...

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 ...

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 ...

System-on-chip (SoC) architects have a new memory technology, last level cache (LLC), to help overcome the design obstacles of bandwidth, latency and power consumption in megachips for advanced driver ...

Magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM) is a non-volatile memory technology that relies on the (relative) magnetization state of two ferromagnetic layers to store binary information. Throughout ...

Editor’s Note: Demand for increasing functionality and performance in systems designs continues to drive the need for more memory even as hardware engineers balance the dynamics of system capability, ...