Cache

:This article is about computer sciences. For other meanings of cache, see the disambiguation page.

Related Topics:
Computer sciences - Disambiguation

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In computer science, a cache (pronounced kăsh) is a collection of data duplicating original values stored elsewhere or computed earlier, where the original data are expensive (usually in terms of access time) to fetch or compute relative to reading the cache. Once the data are stored in the cache, future use can be made by accessing the cached copy rather than refetching or recomputing the original data, so that the average access time is lower.

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Caches have proved extremely effective in many areas of computing, because access patterns in typical computer applications have locality of reference. There are several sorts of locality, but we mainly mean that the same data are often used several times, with accesses that are close together in time, or that data near to each other are accessed close together in time.

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