Honestly, the diagrams that I wish to reproduce already exist here. Currently this page is in construction and probably will be until I finish my Doctorate.
“Memory is the mother of all wisdom." — Aeschylus
Babbage's Big Brain
Memory as a Hierarchy — Not a Monolith
Hierarchy exists for two intertwined reasons:
- Physics – Smaller structures are faster and nearer to ALUs but hold less data; larger structures store more but are farther away and thus slower.
- Economics – Fast memory costs disproportionately more per byte.
An efficient system arranges multiple layers so that > the majority of accesses hit the small, fast part, > while the bulk of bytes reside in the large, cheap part.