Comment by adgjlsfhk1

This the the most cursed part of modern cpu design, but the TLDR is that programs use virtual addresses while CPUs use physical addresses which means that CPU caches need to include the translation from virtual to physical adress. The problem is that for L1 cache, the latency requirement of 3-4 cycles is too strict to first do a TLB lookup and then an L1 cache lookup, so the L1 can only be keyed on the bits of ram which are identical between physical and virtual addresses. With a 4k page size, you only have 6 bits between the size of your cache line (64 bytes) and the size of your page, which means that at an 8 way associative L1D, you only get 64 buckets*64 bytes/bucket=32 kbits of L1 cache. If you want to increase that while keeping the 4k page size, you need to up the associativity, but that has massive power draw and area costs, which is why on x86, L1D on x86 hasn't increased since core 2 duo in 2006.