Performance considerations

• price/performance ratio — common measure of success
• hit rate — number of hits as a fraction of all attempted accesses
• miss rate — number of misses as fraction of attempted accesses
• miss penalty — total access time seen by processor when miss occurs

improvements:

• larger cache (increased cost)
• larger block size (only effective up to a certain size, take longer to transfer)
• load-through approach reduces miss penalty
• implement cache on processor chip
• write buffer — temporary storage of write requests, then sent all at once to main memory
• prefetching data into cache
• lockup-free cache — let processor access cache while a miss is being serviced