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.

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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.