When you think of memory in your computer, you might think of things like DDR 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 hyperthreading 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 the 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 a 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
SRAMM, 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, CPUs 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%.
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 three or L3
cache is built in with higherend modules
having a few extra megabytes. And if you're wondering what the heck happened
to levels one and two, these are smaller, even faster parts of the cache
that your CPU will try and hit before looking for data in your level three
cache. Okay, Luke, that's cool and all, but will better cache actually give me
more FPS in games or faster speeds in 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 higherend processor because you need
more cores, higher IPCs, or better overclocking potential in general, it'll
probably come with more cash 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
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