Also good is Ulrich Drepper's "What every programmer should know about memory". It talks about what happens at a very low level from the CPU registers and L1-3

Also good is Ulrich Drepper's "What every programmer should know about memory". It talks about what happens at a very low level from the CPU registers and L1-3 caches to system memory and disk, and how the OS handles it all. 8-page series on lwn, with comments: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ [pdf] http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf