Cache me if you can! 2

What this cache design interview question tests

This is a medium-difficulty computer-architecture question that probes your understanding of how cache organization affects miss rates. Rather than asking you to compute misses in a given cache, it requires you to work backwards: determining what cache configuration would produce equivalent performance to a different design.

Questions like this are common in systems and infrastructure interviews because they test whether you grasp the trade-offs between cache parameters—size, associativity, and block size—and how they interact to influence real-world access patterns. The focus is on reasoning about memory hierarchies and the relationship between hardware constraints and algorithmic behaviour.

• Direct-mapped vs. set-associative cache organization
• Block size and spatial locality
• Cache miss analysis and conflict misses
• Scaling cache capacity while managing cost and latency