Improving l2 cache performance through stream-directed optimizations
Sohum Sohoni, Yiming Hu · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2004
Research on caches has traditionally concentrated on the L1 cache.Most of the improvements in the design of L2 caches have been rather simple: increase in size and associativity.We believe that the L2 offers some unique opportunities for improvement.First, the L2 does not lie on the critical path, and can be made more complex.Second, the L1 filters out many temporal references to data blocks, so that accesses to the L2 are more uniform and show streaming patterns.Third, the miss penalty of the L2 cache is very high, since the next level in the memory hierarchy is usually the main memory (system RAM).In this work, we propose to improve overall performance by detecting streaming references at the L2 access level and by performing stream-based optimizations.I would like to thank all the people