Chips Sliding Away
May 26, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
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When you look at a photograph of a microprocessor die, doesn’t it always look like a city of some kind where electrons live and work? The L1 and L2 cache memories are perhaps where the electrons live, and they work in the central processing units and floating point units, commuting back and forth as they form the signals that become zeros and ones, like a human wave at a football stadium. Main memory is where the electrons go for weekends, and disk storage is where they go for long vacations. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that when people |