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I am working with some multicore simulators such as GEMS or M5. In all of them there is an option to "Warm up the cache". What does that term mean?

doelleri
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Eduardo
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    Also see [what does it mean by cold cache and warm cache concept?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22756092/what-does-it-mean-by-cold-cache-and-warm-cache-concept). – Scott H Sep 25 '15 at 15:18

1 Answers1

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The warm up is just the period of loading a set of data so that the cache gets populated with valid data. If you're doing performance testing against a system that usually has a high frequency of cache hits, without the warm up you'll get false numbers because what would normally be a cache hit in your usage scenario is not and will drag your numbers down.

Peter Oehlert
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