Memory Hierarchy Design-Part 4 . Virtual memory and virtual machines

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, power, and cost against the growing performance gap between processor and memory. Architectures based on memory hierarchy address these issues, and what better source for the details of this approach than an excerpt on the subject from the seminal book on Computer Architecture by John Hennessy and David Patterson. This excerpt comprises: