Computer Architecture Today

Informing the broad computing community about current activities, advances and future directions in computer architecture.
Modestly Better Prefetching

Modestly Better Prefetching

Cache prefetching is a well-studied topic, but we continue to strive for improvement. Two small ideas are presented here, one for software prefetching and one for hardware. Bigger software prefetches When I worked at Google, a survey of fleet execution time revealed...

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The Persistence of Non-Volatile Memory: Exploiting the Growing Design Space

The Persistence of Non-Volatile Memory: Exploiting the Growing Design Space

Non-volatile memory technologies have a rich past dating back to the 1960s. Fairchild R&D Lab member Chih-tang Sah first noted in 1961 the ability of electric charge to remain on the surface of an electrical device for up to several days. By the 1970s the first...

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