Why Might it Work?

Diagrams/hierarchy2.eps

• Loops: a small set of instructions is repeatedly executed. Instructions that were accessed in the recent past will hopefully still be in the cache when they are next required

• Procedure call stacks, arrays...

Temporal locality:

recently referenced items are likely to be referenced again soon, e.g. loops, stacks, temporary variables

Spatial locality:

programs tend to access items whose addresses are near one another, e.g. arrays, code segments, stacks

Hit ratio:

the ratio of the number of cache hits to the number of cache accesses