Bo Sung Jung , Jung Hoon Lee

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 69-78, Apr. 2009
10.3745/KIPSTA.2009.16.2.69,   PDF Download:

Abstract

One of the most effective way to improve cache performance is to exploit both temporal and spatial locality given by any program executive characteristics. In this paper we present a high performance and low power cache structure with a bank selection mechanism that enhances exploitation of spatial and temporal locality. The proposed cache system consists of two parts, i.e., a main direct-mapped cache with a small block size and a fully associative buffer with a large block size as a multiple of the small block size. Especially, the main direct-mapped cache is constructed as two banks for low power consumption and stores a small block which is selected from fully associative buffer by the proposed bank selection algorithm. By using the bank selection algorithm and three state bits, We selectively extend the lifetime of those small blocks with high temporal locality by storing them in the main direct-mapped caches. This approach effectively reduces conflict misses and cache pollution at the same time. According to the simulation results, the average miss ratio, compared with the Victim and STAS caches with the same size, is improved by about 23% and 32% for Mibench applications respectively. The average memory access time is reduced by about 14% and 18% compared with the he victim and STAS caches respectively. It is also shown that energy consumption of the proposed cache is around 10% lower than other cache systems that we examine.

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