# what is the meaning of hit time?

Average memory access time = Hit time + Miss rate * miss penalty


Assume a computer with only one cache level. What is the exact meaning of hit time? Is it the number of clock cycles to access data from cache? OR Clock cycles to execute an instruction? How does the number of clock cycle per instruction come into this equation?

• It's usually number of clock cycles to access the data and is given in ns. – Gokul Nov 22 '18 at 11:34

It's back to the mechanism of cache. When the cpu wants a data in cache, try to read data from cache. If there is the data in cache, It will fetch data from cache. This time of reading data from cache (the different between the speed of cache memory and register!) will be denoted by Hit time.
If the wanted memory in the related instruction does not exist in the cache memory, it should be read from RAM, hence, it takes more cpu clock to read the specified address and this time is calculated by the multiplication of the miss rate and the penalty of this miss in time of reading data from RAM which is denoted by miss penalty.