Predicting Last-Touch References under Optimal Replacement
Wei-Fen Lin, Steven K. Reinhardt · 2002
Effective cache replacement is becoming an increasingly important issue in cache hierarchy design as large set-associative caches are widely used in high-performance systems. This paper proposes a novel approach to approximate the decisions made by an optimal replacement algorithm (OPT) using last-touch prediction. The central idea is to identify, via prediction, the final reference to a cache block before the block would be evicted under OPT---the "OPT last touch". Given perfect prediction, replacing the referenced block immediately after each OPT last touch would give optimal replacement behavior.