Summary

This chapter introduced some of the terminology of processor architecture. The important points to be aware of are how caches are used to improve the performance of applications and how TLBs are used to enable the use of virtual memory. The chapter introduced the various ways that multiple threads can be supported on a single processor. Although at a high level of abstraction the implementation details of this resource sharing are not important, we will discuss later how they do produce visible performance impacts. Finally, the chapter described how processes and software threads are mapped into memory and the important differences between multithreaded and multiprocess applications.