Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB)
The Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) is a small, high-speed cache inside the MMU that stores recently used virtual-to-physical address mappings. Since accessing these mappings in memory is slow, the TLB helps speed up address translation by reducing the need to fetch mapping table entries from RAM. A TLB hit means the translation is found instantly, while a TLB miss requires fetching the mapping from the table in main memory.