What is CPU Cache?

when you think of memory in your computer you might think of things like DVR modules vram on your graphics card or most likely just hard drives and SSDs but there's actually another type of memory that's incredibly fast and essential to the speed that we've gotten accustomed to with modern computers I'm talking about your CPU cache no not the money that you blew on that processor with hyper-threading that you didn't really need what we're talking about is cache with an e it's a specialized type of memory that's built into your CPU but why the heck would your processor need its own memory aren't that 16 gigs of ram or whatever the heck you already have in your computer good enough well not really to be honest you see those Ram modules are a heck of a lot faster than say a hard drive in terms of data transfer like a lot faster but your CPU actually wants data much faster than your Ram can even provide it and on top of that as CPUs have gotten faster over the years they continue to outstrip typical Ram modules by wider and wider margins meaning that without faster memory your CPU is going to be sitting around doing nothing like kind of unproductive employee as it waits for RAM and you'll run into bottlenecks as a result this is where cache comes in unlike system memory which consists of dynamic RAM or DRAM your CPU cache is static RAM or SRAM which is more expensive and takes up more space but is much faster than DRAM because it doesn't have to be constantly refreshed in order to hold data the way that DRAM has to be an average CPU will only have a few megabytes of cache but it makes a tremendous use of this small amount of memory you see when a CPU accesses something from your main system Ram it generally stores it in its cache then uses complex algorithms to guess as to what other instructions or data it might need next and it fetches those from your system Ram as well since these guesses aren't perfect CPU suffer from things called cache misses where it searches its own cache can't find what it needs and has to access your system memory directly instead which slows things down fortunately however modern processors have gotten pretty good at deciding what to put inside their caches as they'll typically have a cache hit rate of better than 80 percent meaning that most of the time your CPU is only processing what it finds in cache and doesn't have to bother talking to your slower system memory at all and as you may have guessed more cache is advantageous so when you're shopping for a processor the product page will indicate how much level 3 or l3 cache is built-in with higher-end modules having a few extra megabytes and if you're wondering what the heck happened to levels 1 & 2 these are smaller even faster parts of the cache that your cpu will try and hit before looking for data in your level 3 cache okay look that's cool and all but will better cache actually give me more FPS in games or faster speeds and my other stuff well this can depend on the specific application but you can see performance increases kind of overall on CPUs with larger caches fortunately though if you're buying a higher-end processor because you need more cores higher IPC's or better overclocking potential in general it'll probably come with more cache as well so it's not really something that you have to really think about too much of course if you really want that high-end silicon make sure that you're paying attention how much cash with an S that your wallet has left are you trying to program payments into your app and it's just not that easy if you're building a mobile app and searching for a simple payment solution check out Braintree brain trees V 0 SDK is one amazingly simple integration away from giving you simple payments every time developers around the world have embraced the Braintree VI 0 SDK is the easiest way to add secure mobile payments to their apps and web site once integrated Braintree supports a bunch of different ways to pay like Apple pay Android pay PayPal venmo credit cards and even Bitcoin and if something new pops up Braintree will support that too it's used by uber Airbnb github it's scalable it integrates into your app easily just a few lines of code try it in the sandbox learn more about Braintree in the video description down below and get your first 50,000 in transactions fee free at Braintree payments comm slash tech quickie but are you cashed out if you are be sure to like the video dislike the video subscribe do all those fun things then on your way out the door be sure to check out channel super fund right across the street there fantastic highly recommended and as always leave a comment on the little book as you as you leave with the suggestions that you might have for how we could make your stay even more better next time and anyways thank you for enjoying tech quickie we'll see you again

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 1,069,975

Rating: 4.9324431 out of 5

Keywords: cpu, cache, l1, l2, l3, instruction cache, data cache, cache hit, cache miss, memory, sram, static ram, processor, intel, amd

Id: sHqNMHf2UNI

Length: 5min 1sec (301 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 14 2016