Displaying items by tag: Caching

Toshiba has developed a special version of MRAM memory with low power consumption and high performance, intended for processors that are built into smartphones and tablets. MRAM is supposed to replace the conventional cache-based SRAM cells in SoC's. These SoC's should be spending up to two-thirds less energy due to the new technology. Admittedly, it is not clear whether the cost savings are related to the complete SoC's or only the cache.

For those of you that are old enough to remember the birth of the AMD Athlon CPU then you might also remember that AMD picked up quite a bit of the technology from a company called DEC. DEC had a CPU that at the time was simply amazing. To make matters worse it was a 667MHz CPU that was able to run rings around both Intel’s and AMD’s 1GHZ CPUs. There were multiple reasons for this but the most under rated one was the efficient caching structure. The DEC Alpha processor was light years ahead of most CPUs on the market at the time, but due to it being a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) CPU it was not as flexible as even the slower X86 CPUs.