victim cache

victim cache

(architecture)An extension to a direct mapped cache thatadds a small, secondary, fully associative cache to storecache blocks that have been ejected from the main cache due toa capacity or conflict miss. These ejected blocks are likelyto be needed again so storing them in the secondary cacheshould increase performance.

Victim caches with as few as five places have been found toreduce conflict misses, especially for small, direct-mappeddata caches. E.g. a four-place victim cache removed 20% to95% (depending on program) of such misses in a 4-KB cache.

http://www.scism.sbu.ac.uk/ccsv/josephmb/CS-L2-MT/week12.html.