Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Since someone (Andrew?) recently mentioned something about caches.

> http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/what-your-computer-does-while-you-wait

  In the good old days the CPU and the RAM had the same speed. In other
words, the RAM controller could supply the CPU with data at the exact
speed at which the CPU could read it. This made both the CPU and the
RAM controllers very simple and straightforward to implement.

  Then at some point CPU speeds started growing faster than RAM speeds.
At some points it got so ridiculous that the CPU could theoretically
read hundreds of times faster than the RAM controller could feed it.
Of course since basically everything the CPU can do is in RAM (including
the very code the CPU is trying to execute), something had to be done,
or else the CPU would simply be idle most of the time while waiting for
the data to arrive from RAM.

  I suppose a huge percentage of development resources have been put
into solving the problem of how to feed the CPU with data as fast as
it can eat it.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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