UART Publications
Skewed Caches from a Low-Power Perspective
Mathias Spjuth, Martin Karlsson and Erik Hagersten
In Proceedings of Computing Frontiers, Ischia, Italy, May 2005.
Abstract
The common approach to reduce cache conflicts is to increase the associativity. From a dynamic power perspective this associativity comes at a high cost. In this paper we present miss ratio performance and a dynamic power comparison for set-associative caches, a skewed cache and also for a new organization proposed, the elbow cache. The elbow cache extends the skewed cache organization with a relocation strategy for conflicting blocks. We show that these skewed designs significantly reduce the conflict problems while consuming up to 56% less dynamic power than a comparably performing 8-way set associative cache. We believe this to be the strongest case in favor of skewed caches presented so far.
Available as PDF
(209 kB)
BibTeX file entry: Spjuth:2005:may