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 ...

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 ...

The disk cache in OS X can sometimes use a fair amount of the system's RAM, and clearing it can help you figure out how much RAM your applications and system processes are using. Topher, an avid Mac ...

When talking about CPU specifications, in addition to clock speed and number of cores/threads, ' CPU cache memory ' is sometimes mentioned. Developer Gabriel G. Cunha explains what this CPU 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 ...

RAM, or Random Access Memory, is what your computer uses to multi-task. Most devices with any kind of computer inside, whether it’s a PC, laptop, smartphone, or game console, will require a minimum ...

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 ...

Why it matters: A RAM drive is traditionally conceived as a block of volatile memory "formatted" to be used as a secondary storage disk drive. RAM disks are extremely fast compared to HDDs or even ...