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Inside the Machine
book

Inside the Machine

by Jon Stokes
December 2006
Beginner
320 pages
11h 17m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Inside the Machine

Locality of Reference

Caching works because of a very simple property exhibited to one degree or another by all types of code and data: locality of reference. We generally find it useful to talk about two types of locality of reference: spatial locality and temporal locality.

Spatial locality

Spatial locality is a fancy label for the general rule that if the CPU needs an item from memory at any given moment, it’s likely to need that item’s neighbors next.

Temporal locality

Temporal locality is the name we give to the general rule that if an item in memory was accessed once, it’s likely to be accessed again in the near future.

Depending on the type of application, both code and data streams can exhibit spatial and temporal locality.

Spatial Locality ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593271046Errata