Caches take advantage of locality to speed up most data accesses. — Increasing the block size can take advantage of spatial locality. — Increasing cache associativity helps reduce the miss rate. Today we'll finish up with associativity and do two more things. — We'll try to quantify the benefits of different cache designs, and see how caches affect overall performance. — We'll also investigate some main memory organizations that can help increase memory system performance. Next Monday we'll introduce some of the issues involved with writing to caches, and talk about cache configurations in modern processors.
