32nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'05)
The V-Way Cache: Demand Based Associativity via Global Replacement
Madison, Wisconsin
June 04-June 08
ISBN: 0-7695-2270-X
As processor speeds increase and memory latency becomes more critical, intelligent design and management of secondary caches becomes increasingly important. The efficiency of current set-associative caches is reduced because programs exhibit a non-uniform distribution of memory accesses across different cache sets. We propose a technique to vary the associativity of a cache on a per-set basis in response to the demands of the program. By increasing the number of tag-store entries relative to the number of data lines, we achieve the performance benefit of global replacement while maintaining the constant hit latency of a set-associative cache. The proposed variable-way, or V-Way, set-associative cache achieves an average miss rate reduction of 13% on sixteen benchmarks from the SPEC CPU2000 suite. This translates into an average IPC improvement of 8%.
Citation:
Moinuddin K. Qureshi, David Thompson, Yale N. Patt, "The V-Way Cache: Demand Based Associativity via Global Replacement," isca, pp.544-555, 32nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'05), 2005