What is Caches?

Caches are hardware or software components that store data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. A cache hit occurs when the requested data can be found in a cache, while a cache miss occurs when the requested data cannot be found. Caches are commonly used in computer systems to improve performance by reducing access latency and increasing throughput. Common examples include CPU caches, memory caches, and web caches.