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Lecture

Memory Hierarchy and Cache Performance

Description

This lecture covers the concepts of virtual memory, physical memory, and cache memory in computer systems. It explains the structure of hierarchical virtual memory, page tables, TLB, and cache memory. The instructor discusses the characteristics of different cache types and their impact on system performance.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Computer engineering

High-performance computing: Real-time computing

Related concepts (32)

Page (computer memory)

A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, described by a single entry in the page table. It is the smallest unit of data for memory management in a virtual memory operating system. Similarly, a page frame is the smallest fixed-length contiguous block of physical memory into which memory pages are mapped by the operating system. A transfer of pages between main memory and an auxiliary store, such as a hard disk drive, is referred to as paging or swapping.

Page table

A page table is the data structure used by a virtual memory system in a computer operating system to store the mapping between virtual addresses and physical addresses. Virtual addresses are used by the program executed by the accessing process, while physical addresses are used by the hardware, or more specifically, by the random-access memory (RAM) subsystem. The page table is a key component of virtual address translation that is necessary to access data in memory.

Virtual memory

In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very large (main) memory". The computer's operating system, using a combination of hardware and software, maps memory addresses used by a program, called virtual addresses, into physical addresses in computer memory.

Memory paging

In computer operating systems, memory paging (or swapping on some Unix-like systems) is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage for use in main memory. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called pages. Paging is an important part of virtual memory implementations in modern operating systems, using secondary storage to let programs exceed the size of available physical memory.

Virtual address space

In computing, a virtual address space (VAS) or address space is the set of ranges of virtual addresses that an operating system makes available to a process. The range of virtual addresses usually starts at a low address and can extend to the highest address allowed by the computer's instruction set architecture and supported by the operating system's pointer size implementation, which can be 4 bytes for 32-bit or 8 bytes for 64-bit OS versions.

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Explores virtual memory systems, address translation, page tables, and hierarchical schemes in memory management.

Virtual Memory: Hierarchical Structure and Translation

Explores virtual memory hierarchical structure, address translation, offset field sizes, page table size calculation, and Alpha Processor address generation.

Cache Memory

Explores cache memory design, hits, misses, and eviction policies in computer systems, emphasizing spatial and temporal locality.

Automatic Synthesis of OS Code