[Solved]: Does exploiting a spatial Locality in Cache always leads to a lower miss rate?

Problem Detail: 

I've read that, incorporating many words(spatial locality) per cache blocks leads to lower miss rate. Is it the case always? One possibility of such approach is to make a single cache block of size equal to the size of the cache, but that would be meaningless as far as benefits of memory hierarchy are concerned. Isn't it so?

Asked By : Winn

Answered By : vonbrand

If you use larger blocks in the cache, it will mean having less blocks available (given fixed cache size). If the blocks are too large, part of them isn't used; if they are too small, there is much traffic loading them.

More than very general statements like the above, it is almost impossible to say anything unless considering some specific memory access traces. Real workloads access memory in definite patterns that moreover change in time. Look up the working set model.

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Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/22960