Happy New Year!

I've been preoccupied with other stuff, but found a little time to work on my TI-99/4A clone. One of the things I've been wanting to do a long time is to understand how cache memories work, so I created one for this system. My update at GitHub explains the details, but there is now a 1K byte combined code and data cache, and system performance is up by 22%.

Adding one cache is cool, but having more than one is better, so more coming - stay tuned. The cache is really the enabling piece in increasing concurrency within the CPU, since having caches allows multiple memory accesses to be processed simultaneously. The TMS9900 is a very memory intensive processor, as the architectural registers (the so-called workspace) is actually located in main memory. Thus it benefits from cache memories perhaps even more than many other systems.

Even with only the simple system-level cache that I created there are now many more opportunities to optimise the CPU's execution, as now memory reads no longer dominate execution time as much as in the past.

Link to GitHub