Translation Lookaside Buffer
The TLB is a small cache of the most recent virtual-physical mappings. By checking here first, temporal locality is exploited to speed virtual address transaltion.
Block size 1-2 page-table entries
Hit Time 1/2-1 clock cycle
Miss penalty 10-30 clock cycles
The strange name comes from the idea that, while the
process to perform a virtual-to-physical translation is
underway, the hardware checks to see if it has seen this
translation problem recently.