What term describes the memory locality principle where if a memory location is accessed, nearby memory locations are likely to be accessed soon (such as in sequential array loops)?
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: A. Spatial locality
- Step 1: Programs exhibit predictable execution locality patterns that enable hardware caching to achieve high hit rates.
- Step 2: Spatial locality observed during sequential code execution and contiguous array processing is exploited by caching multi-byte cache lines (e.g., 64 bytes) whenever a single byte is referenced.
Answer
Spatial locality
Why not the others: 'Temporal locality' Temporal locality states that a specific memory address accessed recently is likely to be accessed again soon (such as loop index variables); 'Associative locality' Associativity refers to cache indexing structure (direct-mapped vs set-associative), not a program behavioral locality principle; 'Virtual locality' Virtual memory maps logical pages to physical frames, but does not describe the spatial clustering of memory references.
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