Software performance considerations when using cache by Steve Daily, Intel Corp.  

This paper has discussed some basic concepts of cache operation and organization and presented some software examples to demonstrate how an awareness of the operation of the cache on your system can help improve software performance.

The use of cache in computer systems can dramatically improve system performance.  Increasing cache size is a cost-effective way to improve performance on microprocessors as the transistor count on the chip increases. While the operation of cache is generally transparent to the programmer, some issues can arise that influence a program’s performance.

This paper will look at some of the issues that affect single-processor system performance arising from the tendency of programs to refer to data and instructions in locations of memory close to previously accessed locations. This tendency is called Locality of Reference and is the basic property that allows cache to improve processor performance

Recently I got chance to implement a dynamic memory allocation based ANSI C program, and since I am performance freak, I end up writing same program in three styles with performance range of 1X-5X. Currently, I am working on an article to show various coding styles (Simplified ) for dynamic memory allocation and performance evaluation of each!! Keep tuned. And Ideas are always welcome!!