Customer Reviews

Cache Memory Book, The, Second Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

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Being a digital design engineer, I wanted a book that would provide an insight into the way caches are used to solve the classic memory bandwidth problem. This book completely matched my expectations and more! It starts with a overview chapter that already touches most aspects that are involved with cache functionality. It ends with a real-world schematic of a simple (but working!) cache implementation of a 68020 procesor. The second chapter is a killer one and focusses in-depth on the tricks that can be used for squeeze more performance out of the basic cache implementation and the issue that might pop up. The first two chapters contained the information that I was really looking for. Chapter three handles some differences between RISC and CISC processor. Only 11 pages, a bit dated. Chapter four concentrates on cache coherency in multi-processor designs and some ways to solve problems. These are topics that I didn't have to deal with in the past. Interesting stuff! Finally, a chapter is devoted to some tricks that have been used to solve very specific problems. I found the book is balanced, well written and was detailed enough to satisfy my needs.

The book deals with different kinds of cache design, real world cache problems and interesting cache tricks. good to have as an on shelf reference for a practicing design engineer.

This book (hard cover) is the ultimate reference about memory cache architecture. If you want to learn deeply how this circuit works, this book is perfect. It covers also the architecture of RAM memory.