Cache

Pronounced like "cash", not "catch", and definitely not "cashé". There are many different types of caches but they all serve basically the same purpose. They store recently-used information in a place where it can be accessed extremely fast. For example, a web browser like Netscape Navigator uses a cache to store the pages, images, sounds, and URLs of web sites you visit on your hard drive. With this neat strategy, when you visit a page you have recently been to, everything doesn't have to be downloaded to your computer all over again. Because accessing your computer's hard disk is much faster than accessing the Internet, this speeds up web browsing significantly. Your computer also uses disk caching, which stores information you have recently read from your hard disk in the computer's RAM. Since accessing RAM is much faster than reading data off the hard disk, this helps speed up common functions on your computer. One more type of cache is a processor cache which stores small amounts of information on or next to the processor. This helps make the processing of common instructions much more efficient, thereby speeding up computation time. Neat, huh?