Importance of Memory Structure in High Performance Architectures
Actually memory bandwidth is an essential problem in any computer as doing more computations per second requires accessing more memory cells per second!
- Harder for sequential than parallel computers
Key limit is that memory gets slower as it gets larger and one tries to keep information as near to CPU as possible (in necessarily small size storage)
This Data locality is unifying concept of caches (sequential) and parallel computer multiple memory accesses
Problem seen in extreme case for Superconducting CPU’s which can be 100X current CPU’s but seem to need to use conventional memory