3 ms·
Does L1-L3 cache can be considered as a sort of bistable RAM?
by enz 7y ago
Does L1-L3 cache can be considered as a sort of bistable RAM?
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoIn some sort of technical sense, yes; it's made out of SRAM and one could have the cache be mapped exactly to a block of memory that is the same size as the cache. In a practical sense, no, because it's structured as cache and accessing it is more convoluted than direct access to a bare block of memory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_placement_policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_placement_policies for a description of the various types of cache structures.
- karmakaze 7y agoIf you never loaded addresses outside of the cached memory locations either explicitly or speculatively then without invalidation you could run entirely in L3 so it would be serving as storage rather than cache RAM.