Application-adaptive intelligent cache memory system

Abstract

This article presents the design of a simple hardware-controlled, high performance cache system. The design supports fast access time, optimal utilization of temporal and spatial localities adaptive to given applications, and a simple dynamic fetching mechanism with different fetch sizes. Support for dynamically varying the fetch size makes the cache equally effective for general-purpose as well as multimedia applications. Our cache organization and operational mechanism are especially designed to maximize temporal locality and spatial locality, selectively and adaptively. Simulation shows that the average memory access time of the proposed cache is equal to that of a conventional direct-mapped cache with eight times as much space. In addition, the simulations show that our cache achieves better performance than a 2-way or 4-way set associative cache with twice as much space. The average miss ratio, compared with the victim cache with 32-byte block size, is improved by about 41% or 60% for general applications and multimedia applications, respectively. It is also shown that power consumption of the proposed cache is around 10% to 60% lower than other cache systems that we examine. Our cache system thus offers high performance with low power consumption and low hardware cost.

An energy efficient cache memory architecture for embedded systems

“…Pad power can be calculated as 0.5 * Vdd 2 * (0.5 * (Wdata + Waddr)) * 20pF [6], [9], [10], [12], where Wdata and Waddr are the number of bits for both the data sent/returned and the address sent to the lower level memory on a miss request. The last term 20pF is the load capacitance for off-chip destinations [10], [12]. A data cache with a 32-byte block size is assumed, where the values of Wdata and Waddr are also 32 bits.…”

Accommodation of the Bandwidth of Large Cache Blocks Using Cache/Memory Link Compression

“…One possible improvement to the native scheme is to dynamically change the block-size during execution. Previous work in this area have shown promising results [16,9,19,27].…”