Victim cache

A victim cache is a cache used to hold blocks evicted from a CPU cache due to a conflict or capacity miss. The victim cache lies between the main cache and its refill path, and only holds blocks that were evicted from that cache on a miss. This technique is used to reduce the penalty incurred by a cache on a miss.

The original victim cache on the HP PA7200 was a small, fully-associative cache. Later processors, such as the AMD K7 and K8, used the very large secondary cache as a victim cache, to avoid duplicate storage of the contents of the large primary cache.