Improving the performance of adaptive cache in reconfigurable VLIW processor

Abstract

In this paper, we study the impact of cache reconfiguration on the cache misses when the issue-width of a VLIW processor is changed. We clearly note here that our investigation pertains the local temporal effects of the cache resizing and how we counteract the negative impact of cache misses in such resizing instances. We propose a novel reconfigurable d-cache framework that can dynamically adapt its least recently used (LRU) replacement policy without much hardware overhead. We demonstrate that using our adaptive d-cache, it ensures a smooth cache performance from one cache size to the other. This approach is orthogonal to future research in cache resizing for such architectures that take into account energy consumption and performance of the overall application.