That's why I noted that the CPU caches the mappings in the TLB. On modern processors, the MMU is integrated with the rest of the processor, so I didn't see the need to introduce another TLA. It's a part of the processor just as much as, say, the floating point unit is. The whole point of my discussion with small pointer values was to demonstrate that the virtual to physical mapping is transparent.

When I hear "virtual memory," I think of the computer science meaning. However, I am a researcher in high performance computing systems.