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spatial locality

The habit programs have of using data next to what they just used, like the next array element; a cache brings in a whole line so the neighbours are already there.

A reference stream has spatial locality when addresses near a recently accessed address are likely to be accessed soon; caches exploit it by transferring whole lines, and hardware prefetchers by fetching ahead.

Examples

  • Reading a[0], a[1], a[2] in order uses each 64-byte line for 16 consecutive 4-byte ints.

See also

cache line temporal locality
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