As with any other caching structure, you can discover its size,
associativity, and replacement policy by artificially trying to provoke
patterns that produce pathological timings.
At Transmeta, at one time we used a 32-entry direct-mapped cache, which
ended up with a ~96% hit rate on common Win95 benchmarks.
I should, however, make it clear that there are other alternatives for
speeding up segment descriptor loading, and not all of them rely on a cache.
-hpa
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