CentralNotice Translation lookaside buffer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search A translation lookaside buffer ( TLB ) is a cache that memory management hardware uses to improve virtual address translation speed. [ 1 ] The majority of desktop, laptop, and server processors includes one or more TLBs in the memory management hardware, and it is nearly always present in any hardware that utilizes paged or segmented virtual memory . The TLB is sometimes implemented as content-addressable memory (CAM). The CAM search key is the virtual address and the search result is a physical address. If the requested address is present in the TLB, the CAM search yields a match quickly and the retrieved physical address can be used to access memory. This is called a TLB hit. If the requested address is not in the TLB, it is a miss, and the translation procee...