That's not what's meant by 'conflict misses', no. The issue is that, with pot, the hottest elements (logically the ones which represent the highest nodes in th

That's not what's meant by 'conflict misses', no. The issue is that, with pot, the hottest elements (logically the ones which represent the highest nodes in the tree) will be spaced at pot intervals. If the array is large, that means their addresses will differ only in the high bits; in the case of the higher-level caches, then, they'll map to the same cache set and kick each other out, even though the cache as a whole has enough capacity to fit them all.