An area of high-speed memory on the processor that stores commonly used code or data obtained from slower memory, eliminating the need to access the system's main memory to fetch instructions.
The Intel 82385 cache controller chip was used with fast static RAM on some systems to increase performance, but more up-to-date processors include cache-management functions on the main processor.
The Intel Pentium contains two separate 512KB caches, one each for data and instructions.
See also cache; level 2 cache.