Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) improves performance by:

1. A Pushing the entire index metadata to the client application to ensure that all initial search filtering is performed locally without a network hop.
2. B Evaluating `WHERE` clauses using index data inside the storage engine itself *before* reading the full table row to reduce expensive heap fetches.
3. C Automatically caching the most frequently used index pages in the processor's high-speed L3 cache to bypass the operating system's internal page limit.
4. D Applying a specialized, hardware-accelerated compression routine to the index structure to minimize the disk I/O required for large range scans.