Assess students' ability to analyze how data structure choice and memory layout (arrays, linked lists, trees, hash tables) influence CPU cache behavior and runtime performance; scope includes spatial and temporal locality, cache line utilization, pointer-chasing vs contiguous access patterns, expected miss-rate and latency impacts, interpreting simple benchmark results, and proposing cache-friendly redesigns (data packing, node pooling, cache-aware tree layouts, open addressing, prefetching).