On reconfigurable on-chip data caches

Abstract

Cache memory has shown to be the most important technique to bridge the gap between the processor speed and the memory access time. The advent of high-speed RISC and superscalar processors, however, calls for small on-chip data caches. Due to physical limitations, these should be simply designed and yet yield good performance. In this paper, we present new cache architectures that address the problems of conflict misses and non-optimal line sizes in the context of direct-mapped caches. Our cache architectures can be reconfigured by software in a way that matches the reference pattern for array data structures. We show that the implementation cost of the reconfiguration capability is neglectable. We also show simulation results that demonstrate significant performance improvements for both methods.