In order to understand how data structures can be laid out in a cache-friendly manner, let's have a brief look at how caches work in general. Memory on a modern computer system is addressed using 64 bit addresses pointing to 64 bit memory blocks. Remember, Tungsten tries to always use 8-byte Datasets which perfectly fit into these 64-bit memory blocks.
So between your CPU cores and main memory, there is a hierarchical list of L1, L2, and L3 caches-with increasing size. Usually, L3 is shared among all the cores. If your CPU core requests a certain main memory address to be loaded into the CPU core's register (a register is a memory area in your CPU core) - this happens by an explicit machine code (assembler) instruction - then first the L1-3 cache hierarchy is checked to see if it contains the requested memory address.
We call data...
