CACHE (THE FASTEST MEMORY)

CACHE (THE FASTEST MEMORY)

As discussed in my earlier post on DIFFERENT MEMORIES OF COMPUTER, The CACHE is in a main memory of the computer and the computer has got direct access to it. In fact CACHE is one of the fastest and costliest memory of the computer. The main work of the CACHE is to take the data from the memory to the registers were the arithmatic and logical processing is done on it.

Although it is one of the fastest memory still it"s size is smaller, now a days computer has got 512kb of CACHE.now there are two important operations related to cache and that CACHE HIT and CACHE MISS. the CACHE stores the information which is most frequently used by computer and the user. now when we need an information or computer has to perform an operation it looks in the CACHE now if it has already got the desired information than the computer will almost instantly perform the operation and this is known as CACHE HIT. But if it doesn"t have the desired information than it have to be transferred to REGISTERS through CACHE and that takes some time and that is known as cache miss. Now depending on the location and there size the CACHE can be divided in two categories and they are:-

1.) INTERNAL CACHE:- this type of cache has recently been introduced in the computer and its size is only about 64kb only, but already with its introduction the computer speed has already increased by 1000 times. Now this INTERNAL CACHE is located on the same chip as the MICROPROCESSOR.

2.) EXTERNAL CACHE:- This is the main cache of the computer which is in use since long time and has got an size of about 512kb. this CACHE is responsible for taking the data from the RAM to REGISTERS. It is located between the RAM and PROCESSOR(REGISTERS).