The concept of cache, which comes from the French word cachet, can be used in different ways. The first meaning mentioned in the dictionary of the DigoPaul refers to the money paid to an artist or to certain professionals for making a presentation or work.
For example: “We were thinking of hiring an American band for the closing of the festival, but the cache was very high”, “We have not yet agreed on the singer’s cache”, “The coach would agree to lower his cache to continue in the club”.
A rock group, to cite one case, charges a fee to perform live. Television presenters and football coaches, among many other workers, also perceive a cache.
Caché, on the other hand, can be used as a synonym for elegance or refinement: “It will be a party with a lot of cachet”, “The room still has its cache”.
Caché can also be a conjugation of cachar: a verb that refers to catching, grabbing or getting something: “Cache you! I saw how you took the cookies from the jar! ” , “I caught Nina making out with Pablo”, “I haven’t caught it yet, but it’s going to be neglected…”.
Finally, in the field of computing, a cache is called a fast-access temporary memory that stores data that was recently processed.
Although the dictionary of the DigoPaulindicates that the term cache must be written with an accent, since it is an acute word ending in a vowel, it is common to find it without an accent in computer science books, since it is used as an Anglicism; in these cases, it must be written in italics (cache) like any other term of foreign origin.
According to DigoPaul, this cache works like a buffer. When accessing data for the first time, the system makes a copy in the cache. In this way, the following accesses are made to that copy to save time.
Although in terms of technology there is not much difference between the cache and the main memory of the system (that is, the RAM memory), the former has much less capacity and allows considerably faster access. It is precisely because of this last aspect that its price is very high, and that is why it is not used in large quantities; To speak in more specific terms, while current computers usually have a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, their processors do not reach 30 MB of cache memory (note that 1 GB is 1024 MB, so the difference is abysmal ).
Since the cache is so much smaller than the main one, it goes without saying that it is not possible to store all the data of a current program in it (let’s not forget that some usually require several hundred megabytes to execute, an amount that exceeds the capacity of cache dozens of times). For this reason, the microprocessor stores only the data that it will need to use most frequently, leaving the RAM memory for the rest.
One of the secrets of the access speed that the cache can hold over the main one is its location: the manufacturers of processors place it next to them, while the RAM memory must be installed manually on the motherboard, several centimeters processor and its performance depends in part on the speed of the components that connect it to it.
Since the microprocessor makes a copy of certain data in the cache the first time it accesses it, when it needs to read it again, it looks for it there before it does in RAM; if you find them, then you can work much more efficiently.
