Low-power Filter Cache Design Technique for Multicore Processors
Young‐Jin Park, Jong-Myon Kim, Cheol-Hong Kim · Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information · 2009
Energy consumption as well as performance should be considered when designing up-to-date multicore processors. In this paper, we propose new design technique to reduce the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by using modified filter cache. The filter cache has been recognized as one of the most energy-efficient design techniques for singlecore processors. The energy consumed in the instruction cache accounts for a significant portion of total processor energy consumption. Therefore, energy-aware instruction cache design techniques are essential to reduce the energy consumption in a multicore processor. The proposed technique reduces the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by reducing the number of accesses to the level-1 instruction cache. We evaluate the proposed design using a simulation infrastructure based on SimpleScalar and CACTI. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture reduces the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by up to 3.4% compared to the conventional filter cache architecture. Moreover, the proposed architecture shows better performance over the conventional filter cache architecture.