1. Part of the PentiumŪ 4 processor\'s IntelŪ NetBurstŪ micro-architecture. In addition to the 8 KB data cache, the Pentium 4 processor includes an Execution Trace Cache that stores up to 12 K decoded micro-ops in the order of program execution. This increases performance by removing the decoder from the main execution loop and makes more efficient usage of the cache storage space since instructions that are branched around are not stored. As a result, a high volume of instructions are delivered to the processor\'s execution units and the overall time required to recover from erroneous branch predictions is decreased.