The Effects of Processor Architecture on Instruction Memory Traffic

Abstract

The relative amount of instruction traffic for two architectures is about the same in the presence of a large cache as with no cache. Furthermore, the presence of an intermediate-sized cache probably substantially favors the denser architecture. Encoding techniques have a much greater impact on instruction traffic than do the differences between instruction set families such as stack and register set. However, register set architectures have somewhat lower instruction traffic than directly comparable stack architectures of some local variables are allocated in registers. This study has clearly indicated that cache factors should be taken into consideration when making architectural tradeoffs. The differences in memory traffic between two architectures may be greatly amplified in the presence of a cache. © 1990, ACM. All rights reserved.