High speed memory to cope up with the speed gap between processor and main memory is __________.

Option A

A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations. Most CPUs have different independent caches, including instruction and data caches, where the data cache is usually organized as a hierarchy of more cache levels (L1, L2, L3, L4, etc.).

All modern (fast) CPUs (with few specialized exceptions have multiple levels of CPU caches. The first CPUs that used a cache had only one level of cache; unlike later level 1 caches, it was not split into L1d (for data) and L1i (for instructions). Split L1 cache started in 1985 with the R2000 MIPS CPU, achieved mainstream in 1993 with the Intel Pentium and in 1997 the embedded CPU market with the ARMv5TE. In 2015, even sub-dollar SoC split the L1 cache. They also have L2 caches and, for larger processors, L3 caches as well. The L2 cache is usually not split and acts as a common repository for the already split L1 cache. Every core of a multi-core processor has a dedicated L1 cache and is usually not shared between the cores. The L2 cache, and higher-level caches, may be shared between the cores. L4 cache is currently uncommon, and is generally on (a form of) dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), rather than on static random-access memory (SRAM), on a separate die or chip (exceptionally, the form, eDRAM is used for all levels of cache, down to L1). That was also the case historically with L1, while bigger chips have allowed integration of it and generally all cache levels, with the possible exception of the last level. Each extra level of cache tends to be bigger and optimized differently.

Other types of caches exist (that are not counted towards the "cache size" of the most important caches mentioned above), such as the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) which is part of the memory management unit (MMU) which most CPUs have.

Caches (like for RAM historically) have generally been sized in powers of: 2, 4, 8, 16 etc. KiB; when up to MiB sizes (i.e. for larger non-L1), very early on the pattern broke down, to allow for larger caches without being forced into the doubling-in-size paradigm, with e.g. Intel Core 2 Duo with 3 MiB L2 cache in April 2008. Much later however for L1 sizes, that still only count in small number of KiB, however IBM zEC12 from 2012 is an exception, to gain unusually large 96 KiB L1 data cache for its time, and e.g. the IBM z13 having a 96 KiB L1 instruction cache (and 128 KiB L1 data cache) and Intel Ice Lake-based processors from 2018, having 48 KiB L1 data cache and 48 KiB L1 instruction cache. In 2020, some Intel Atom CPUs (with up to 24 cores) have (multiple of) 4.5 MiB and 15 MiB cache sizes.