Hardware

33 readers

1 users here now

A place for quality hardware news, reviews, and intelligent discussion.

founded 11 months ago

MODERATORS

[Tom's Hardware] AMD 3D V-Cache enables RAM disk to hit 182 GB/s speeds - over 12X faster than the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (7 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux

There are <100MB Linux distributions. Is it theoretically possible to run an entire operating system without RAM, purely in CPU cache?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (4 children)

That's exactly what is done during bring up of new SoCs. Memory controllers are either non-functional in early prototypes or a miniature design is put into a bunch of FPGAs with only a single core and caches. The cache lines and TLB entries are primed and pinned with all relevant code and data pages before booting up a kernel.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

On coreboot this boot method is called CAR, Cache as RAM, pretty interesting usage of cache to be honest, no need to add separate SRAM if you already have some