Embedded Systems Design, 2nd Edition

Memory systems 105

apparent that there is no clear cut advantage of one configuration

over another. It is very easy to get into religious wars of cache

organisation where one faction will argue that their particular

organisation is right and that everything else is wrong. In practice,

it is incredibly difficult to make such claims without measuring

and benchmarking a real system. In addition, the advantages can

be small compared to other performance techniques such as

software optimisation. In the end, the bigger the cache the better,

irrespective of its set-associativity or not is probably the best

maxim to remember.

Size

(k)

1

8

16

32

32

32

64

64

64

64

64

12

8

128 ...