what role does the Processor cashe play in general computing

[iThink]

excuse my ignorance into this matter but what role does the Processor cashe play in general computing


thank you

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[GomJabbar]

Basically it speeds things up quite a bit. If you disable it in the BIOS (an option on some computers), you will notice nearly every task taking somewhat longer to finish. For more detailed info, see following link: CPU cache

[K. Eng]

Cache is extremely important to the performance of modern microprocessors.

In most software, there are groups of instructions that are run over and over again. Cache memory on the CPU stores these instructions so the CPU doesn't have to keep going back to memory to retrieve the instructions. Caches can also store data.

That's the simple explaination. The workings of cache memory are a bit more complicated...