3 ms·
Like other systems of its time it didn't have a cache. CPU and RAM ran at about the same speed, so waiting for data from memory was only a small problem. Everyt
by weinzierl 7y ago
Like other systems of its time it didn't have a cache. CPU and RAM ran at about the same speed, so waiting for data from memory was only a small problem. Everything worked quite deterministic back then.
Now with Moore's law coming to an end I sometimes dream that RAM speeds might catch up so much that we can get rid of the caches again and that we will get back the nice deterministic performance behaviour we had in the old times.
- zozbot234 7y agoYou will always have caches of some sort because of the speed of light limit, and because moving data accounts for a lot of the power consumption in modern-day chips. What you'd need for determinism is caches that behave more like pure scratchpad storage. Ultimately the OS gets in the way of this, as does multicore (which comes with the need for costly cache-coherency setups in order to keep the desired semantics for shared memory access.)