Download or read book Tolerating Latency Through Software-controlled Data Prefetching written by Stanford University. Computer Systems Laboratory and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The large latency of memory accesses in modern computer systems is a key obstacle to achieving high processor utilization. Furthermore, the technology trends indicate that this gap between processor and memory speeds is likely to increase in the future. While increased latency affects all computer systems, the problem is magnified in large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors, where physical dimensions cause latency to be an inherent problem. To cope with the memory latency problem, the basic solution that nearly all computer systems rely on is their cache hierarchy. While caches are useful, they are not a panacea.