Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...

On Fri, 13 Sep 2024 16:25:44 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

On 13/09/2024 04:16, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

>
You put caches as close as possible to the prime user of the
cache.  If the prime user is the cpu and you want to cache data
from flash, external memory, and other sources, you put the cache
tight up against the cpu - then you can have dedicated, wide, fast
buses to the cpu. 

 
I would say that there is a tradeoff between cost and effect.  And
there is question of technical possibility.  For example, 386 was
sold as a chip, and all that a system designer could do was to put
a cache ont the motherboard.  On chip cache would be better, but was
not possible. 

 
There can certainly be such trade-offs.  I don't remember the details
of the 386, but I /think/ the cache was connected separately on a
dedicated bus, rather than on the bus that went to the memory
controller (which was also off-chip, on the chipset).

No, i386 had no back-side bus.
The caches used in i386 based computers are typically described as
"inline" cache.

 So it was
logically close to the cpu even though it was physically on a
different chip.  I think if these sorts of details are of interest, a
thread in comp.arch might make more sense than comp.lang.c.
>