CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

Figure 3-31 CPU-Z showing the cache details of a Haswell Core i7
Figure 3-31 reveals specific details about how this Intel CPU works with
cache. The Core i7 has L1, L2, and L3 caches of 32 KB, 256 KB, and 8 MB,
respectively. (The L1 cache divides into 32 KB to handle data—the D-Cache
—and another 32 KB for instructions—the I-Cache.) Each core has dedicated
L1 and L2 caches. (You can tell this by the ×4 to the right of the capacity
listing.) All six cores share the giant L3 cache. That pool of memory enables
the cores to communicate and work together without having to access the
radically slower main system RAM as much.
CPU manufacturers engineered the cores in multicore CPUs to divide up
work independently of the OS, known as multicore processing. This differs