CAM

Using the TLB makes translation faster, because the initial translation takes one access _per TLB level_, which means 2 on a simple 32 bit scheme, but 3 or 4 on 64 bit architectures.

The TLB is usually implemented as an expensive type of RAM called content-addressable memory (CAM). CAM implements an associative map on hardware, that is, a structure that given a key (linear address), retrieves a value.

Mappings could also be implemented on RAM addresses, but CAM mappings may required much less entries than a RAM mapping.

For example, a map in which:

both keys and values have 20 bits (the case of a simple paging schemes)
at most 4 values need to be stored at each time

could be stored in a TLB with 4 entries:

linear  physical
------  --------
00000   00001
00001   00010
00010   00011
FFFFF   00000

However, to implement this with RAM, _it would be necessary to have 2^20 addresses_:

linear  physical
------  --------
00000   00001
00001   00010
00010   00011
... (from 00011 to FFFFE)
FFFFF   00000

which would be even more expensive than using a TLB.

CAM

 Ancestors (13)