Read and translate the text. "Cache" Memories

"Cache" Memories

"Cache" memories are increasingly common ("cache – a hiding place for provisions, treasures etc"). Cache memories are essentially hidden from the applications programmer; the cache belongs to the computer hardware and its controlling operating system. These work together using a cache to increase performance. Currently, a typical cache memory would be up to 256 KB in size. The cache may form a part of the circuitry of the CPU chip itself, or may be a separate chip. Either way, the system will be designed so that information in the cache can be accessed much more quickly than information in main storage.

The OS and CPU hardware arrange to copy blocks of bytes ("pages") from main memory into the cache. The selected pages could be those with the instructions currently being executed. Most programs involve loops where particular sets of instructions are executed repeatedly. If the instructions forming a loop are in the cache, the CPU's instruction-fetch operation is greatly speeded up. Sometimes it is worth copying pages with data from main memory to the cache – then subsequent data accesses are faster (though data that get changed do have to be copied back to main memory eventually). The operations shifting pages, or individual data elements, between cache and memory are entirely the concern of the CPU hardware and the operating system. The only way that a programmer should be able to detect a cache is by noticing increased system's performance.

All data manipulated by computers are represented by bit patterns. A byte, with 8 individual bits, can represent any of 256 different patterns.