You are asked to optimize a cache design for the given references. There are three direct-mapped cache designs possible, all with a total of 8 words of data: C1 has 1-word blocks, C2 has 2-word blocks, and C3 has 4-word blocks. In terms of miss rate, which cache design is the best? If the miss stall time is 25 cycles, and C1 has an access time of 2 cycles, C2 takes 3 cycles, and C3 takes 5 cycles, which is the best cache design?

Caches are important to providing a high-performance memory hierarchy to processors. Below is a list of 32-bit memory address references, given as word addresses.

3, 180, 43, 2, 191, 88, 190, 14, 181, 44, 186, 253 b. 21, 166, 201, 143, 61, 166, 62, 133, 111, 143, 144, 61 a.