Young Suk Chon , Suk Il Kim , Joong Nam Jeon

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 41-52, Feb. 2005
10.3745/KIPSTA.2005.12.1.41,   PDF Download:

Abstract

Memory reference instruction caused by cache miss is critical factor that limits the processing power of processor. Cache prefetching technique is an effective way to reduce the latency due to memory access. However, excessively aggressive prefetch leads to cache pollution and finally to cancel out the advantage of prefetch. In this study, an active prefetch filtering scheme is introduced which dynamically decides whether to commence prefetching after referring a filtering table to reduce the cache pollution due to unnecessary prefetched. For the precision filtering, an evicted address referencing scheme has been proposed where the filter directly compares the current prefetch address with previous unnecessary prefetch addresses stored in filtering table. Moreover, a small sized exclusive prefetch cache has been introduced to increase the amount of eviction of unnecessarily prefetched addresses to enhance the accuracy of dynamic filtering. The exclusive prefetch cache also prevents useful demand data from being pushed out by prefetched data, while the evicted address direct referencing scheme enables the prefetch cache to keep most of useful prefetch data within its small size. Experimental results from commonly used general and multimedia benchmarks show that the average cache miss ratio has been decreased by 13.3% by virtue of enhanced filtering accuracy compared with conventional schemes.

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