CASHE
The cashe is the fast memory located near the CPU. The amount and
location of the cashe in a processor can have a great impact on the
performance of a computer.
The above picture shows the Pentium Pro Processor. The left die is the
cashe and the right is the CPU. Because they are on the same board,
they can be wired together. This allows the CPU to interface very
quickly with the cashe, which in turn, as Intel points out, "yields
unprecedented performance" (ref).
The above cashe is usually referred to as the L2 cashe. Depending on
the processor speed, the cashe size can be 256KB, 512KB or 1MB.
The Pentium Pro also contains another cashe known as the L1 cashe. This
is the cashe that is split to hold instructions in half of it and data
in the other half. It is 16KB in total, 8KB for the data, and 8KB for
the instructions.