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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
15 years agoDifference between Cache and Tightly Coupled Memeory
Hello, We are designing a system that is used to send video frames from one embedded system to another via Ethernet. It is required to send 30 interlaced frames per second, the design is ...
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
15 years agoYou can easily find the answer in Nios/sopc documentation, which I think is more clear and detailed than what I write here.
Anyway the difference is this: While both are very fast accessed memories, cache stores dynamically data/code which has been lately used in order to improve access speed, compared to standard memory connected to the global Avalon matrix. Every time a memory access is required, the processor checks if the required data is already present in the cache or must be newly fetched from memory; in the meantime, old unused cache data is being continously replaced with new data. Tightly coupled memory is also a fast access memory, since it exploits a dedicated port, but it has static content: you decide what you need there and you specify it in the linker script.