This is a reader question from “jlforrest” that seems worth answering in more detail than just a single sentence: I understand the need for a cache but I don’t understand why there are multiple levels of cache instead of having just one larger level. In other words, let’s say the L1 cache is 32K, the L2 cache is 256K, and the L3 cache is 2M, why not have a single 32K + 256K + 2M L1 cache? The short version is that the various cache levels have very large variations in how they are designed; they...