Quote Originally Posted by nn_step View Post
Cache works like this, You store data and keep the mostly to be used in the fastest media that you have (usually registers, then L1, L2, and so on)
Media/Data that you don't predict or think that will be needed, you drop to a lower level (in terms of performance, aka L1 to L2 and later L2 to Ram)
Know do you know how big 1MB is?
let us assume that we are working in ASCII, thus it is 7bits and to make math easier, let us round up to 8bits per charactor (1Byte)
Now there are 1024Bytes in 1kB, and 1024kB in 1MB or 1,048,576 letters.
Now please guess how much you can do in that little space. (I'll give you a clue, it is 4 times than what you would need for an Operating system)
Media is one of the most cache friendly types of data.It is easy to prefetch , we're talking about a stream after all.