Design of L2 CACHE Replacement Arithmetic for Chip Multiprocessor Architecture
Song-He Liu · Journal of Chinese Computer Systems · 2007
Chip Multi-Processor exploits both instruction-level and thread-level parallelism effectively.In a typical Chip Multi-Processor architecture,L2 Cache is shared by multiple cores.Sharing the L2 Cache allows high Cache utilization and avoids duplicating Cache hardware resources.Unfortunately,the mis-predictions of any processor core could lead the load miss from the wrong path to write some useless data into the shared L2 Cache,and cause L2 Cache pollution.This may increase additional Cache misses and impacts performance of other threads for failing to occupy sufficient L2 Cache space,and even cause starvation.This paper proposes a light Pollution replacement arithmetic,called LPR,which priorities swapping of wrong path data to eliminate the pollution caused by the execution of the wrong path load instructions as soon as possible.Simulation results show that LPR improves the performance of a CMP architecture due to the reductions in the number of Cache misses.