CPUs, Pantries, & Caches! 👻
What is common between Chefs and CPUs in terms of how they strive for efficiency? 🥸
Imagine you're a chef working in a busy restaurant. You have to prepare dishes quickly and efficiently to keep up with the orders coming in. However, the pantry where you store your ingredients is located far away from the kitchen, and it takes a long time to retrieve the ingredients you need. This slows down your cooking and makes it difficult to keep up with the demand.
To solve this problem, you decide to set up a small pantry right next to your cooking station. You fill it with the most commonly used ingredients, such as oil, salt, and chilli (if you like your spices 😝). Now, when you need an ingredient, you can quickly grab it from the nearby pantry instead of making the long trek to the main pantry. This saves you time and allows you to prepare dishes faster and more efficiently.
A very similar strategy is applied to the computer systems as well. In order to understand it better we need to go through the memory hierarchy.
Memory Hierarchy
Memory hierarchy is a system of different memory types, each with its own characteristics, that work together to store and access data in a computer system. The memory hierarchy typically includes several levels of memory, each with different capacities, access speeds, and costs.
