The year so far has been filled with news of Spectre and Meltdown. These exploits take advantage of features like speculative execution, and memory access timing. What they have in common is the fact ...

A process may map files to its address space, thereby creating a 1-to-1 equivalence between the files’ data and its corresponding memory-mapped region. Memory mapping has several uses: Dynamic loading ...

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers have a problem, a big problem in fact, Random Access Memory (RAM) is slow, too slow, it just can’t keep up. So they came up with a workaround and it is called cache ...

In the early days of computing, everything ran quite a bit slower than what we see today. This was not only because the computers' central processing units – CPUs – were slow, but also because ...

In the eighties, computer processors became faster and faster, while memory access times stagnated and hindered additional performance increases. Something had to be done to speed up memory access and ...

When shopping for a new CPU, you're likely to come across many different CPU specifications, such as cores, clock speed, TDP, ...

The memory hierarchy (including caches and main memory) can consume as much as 50% of an embedded system power. This power is very application dependent, and tuning caches for a given application is a ...

One of the greatest challenges facing the designers of many-core processors is resource contention. The chart below visually lays out the problem of resource contention, but for most of us the idea is ...

Cache memory significantly reduces time and power consumption for memory access in systems-on-chip. Technologies like AMBA protocols facilitate cache coherence and efficient data management across CPU ...

Editor’s Note: Demand for increasing functionality and performance in systems designs continues to drive the need for more memory even as hardware engineers balance the dynamics of system capability, ...