Effects of CPU Caches

I recently read this post by Nicolas Douillet about CPU caches and performance. I recommend it! Apart from being a nice, fairly easily digestable recap of how CPUs work when it comes to memory, it also taught me the existence of something I totally didn’t know about until now: the Translation Lookaside
Buffer.

It’s used to cache recently used mappings between physical and virtual memory. I had no idea that this stuff was cached, and that it therefore could have some important effect on performance.