Essential Terms | Saylor University

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D

datapath

The physical collection of hardware repositories and functional units (Registers, ALU, Program Counter, and Memory) that data flows through as an instruction executes.

direct-mapped cache

Every specific memory block in RAM maps to exactly one designated line in the cache. It is incredibly simple and cheap to build, but if a program frequently alternates between two different RAM blocks that map to the same cache line, it causes constant eviction conflicts (cache thrashing).