victim cache

(architecture)

victim cache - An extension to a direct mapped cache that adds a small, secondary, fully associative cache to store cache blocks that have been ejected from the main cache due to a capacity or conflict miss. These ejected blocks are likely to be needed again so storing them in the secondary cache should increase performance. Victim caches with as few as five places have been found to reduce conflict misses, especially for small, direct-mapped data caches. E.g. a four-place victim cache removed 20% to 95% (depending on program) of such misses in a 4-KB cache. http://www.scism.sbu.ac.uk/ccsv/josephmb/CS-L2-MT/week12.html.