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Minimizing Area Cost of On-Chip Cache Memories by Caching Address Tags
November 1997 (vol. 46 no. 11)
pp. 1187-1201
ASCII Text
x 
 
Hong Wang, Tong Sun, Qing Yang, "Minimizing Area Cost of On-Chip Cache Memories by Caching Address Tags," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 46, no. 11, pp. 1187-1201, November, 1997.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/12.644293,
author = {Hong Wang and Tong Sun and Qing Yang},
title = {Minimizing Area Cost of On-Chip Cache Memories by Caching Address Tags},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Computers},
volume = {46},
number = {11},
issn = {0018-9340},
year = {1997},
pages = {1187-1201},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/12.644293},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Computers
TI - Minimizing Area Cost of On-Chip Cache Memories by Caching Address Tags
IS - 11
SN - 0018-9340
SP1187
EP1201
EPD - 1187-1201
A1 - Hong Wang,
A1 - Tong Sun,
A1 - Qing Yang,
PY - 1997
KW - Cache memory
KW - single-chip processor
KW - on-chip cache
KW - memory hierarchy
KW - performance evaluation.
VL - 46
JA - IEEE Transactions on Computers
ER -
 

Abstract—This paper presents a technique for minimizing chip-area cost of implementing an on-chip cache memory of microprocessors. The main idea of the technique is Caching Address Tags, or CAT cache, for short. The CAT cache exploits locality property that exists among addresses of memory references. By keeping only a limited number of distinct tags of cached data, rather than having as many tags as cache lines, the CAT cache can reduce the cost of implementing tag memory by an order of magnitude without noticeable performance difference from ordinary caches. Therefore, CAT represents another level of caching for cache memories. Simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate performance of CAT cache as compared to existing caches. Performance results of SPEC92 programs show that the CAT cache, with only a few tag entries, performs as well as ordinary caches, while chip-area saving is significant. Such area saving will increase as the address space of a processor increases. By allocating the saved chip-area for larger cache capacity, or more powerful functional units, CAT is expected to have a great impact on overall system performance.

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Index Terms:
Cache memory, single-chip processor, on-chip cache, memory hierarchy, performance evaluation.
Citation:
Hong Wang, Tong Sun, Qing Yang, "Minimizing Area Cost of On-Chip Cache Memories by Caching Address Tags," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 46, no. 11, pp. 1187-1201, Nov. 1997, doi:10.1109/12.644293
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