Computer Architecture
It is like…
Memory hierarchy is like a kitchen
The memory hierarchy is like cooking jollof in a busy kitchen
Quick check · tap an answer to continue
Lesson notes
Key points
- Picture a cook: spices in hand, ingredients on the counter, more in the fridge, sacks in the storeroom, and the market far away.
- Hands are registers, the counter is cache, the fridge is RAM, the storeroom is the SSD, and each level is bigger but slower.
- Where it breaks: the cache fetches whole blocks called cache lines automatically, betting on locality, with no cook choosing what to move.
Definitions
- Locality of reference
- Programs reuse recent data (temporal) and nearby addresses (spatial), so caches fetch whole blocks.
Takeaway: Each memory level down is bigger, cheaper and slower.
Quick check: In the kitchen analogy, what does the fridge represent?
- CPU registers
- Main memory (RAM)
- The hard disk
The fridge sits between the fast counter (cache) and the big storeroom (disk), like RAM.
The kitchenThe mappingLocality
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