Two-Level Scratchpad Memory Architectures to Achieve Time Predictability and High Performance
Yu Liu, Wei Zhang · Journal of Computing Science and Engineering · 2014
In modern computer architectures, caches are widely used to shorten the gap between processor speed and memory access time. However, caches are time-unpredictable, and thus can significantly increase the complexity of worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis, which is crucial for real-time systems. This paper proposes a time-predictable two-level scratchpad-based architecture and an ILP-based static memory objects assignment algorithm to support real-time computing. Moreover, to exploit the load/store latencies that are known statically in this architecture, we study a Scratch-pad Sensitive Scheduling method to further improve the performance. Our experimental results indicate that the performance and energy consumption of the two-level scratchpad-based architecture are superior to the similar cache based architecture for most of the benchmarks we studied.