\(6.2.\)Locality

1.Basic Idea & Example

2.Locality of Instruction Fetch

  In Figure 6.17 the instructions in the body of the for loop are executed in sequential memory order, and thus the loop enjoys good spatial locality. Since the loop body is executed multiple times, it also enjoys good temporal locality.

An important property of code that distinguishes it from program data is that it is rarely modified at run time. While a program is executing, the CPU reads its instructions from memory. The CPU rarely overwrites or modifies these instructions.