Dynamic access distance driven cache replacement

Abstract

In this article, we propose a new cache replacement policy that makes the replacement decision based on the reuse information of the cache lines and the requested data. We present the architectural support and evaluate the performance of our approach using SPEC benchmarks. We also develop two reuse information predictors: a profile-based static predictor and a runtimepredictor. The applicability of each predictor is discussed in this paper. We further extend our reuse information predictors so that the cache can adaptively choose between the reuse information based replacement policy and an approximation of LRU policy. According to the experimental results, our adaptive reuse information based replacement policy performs either better than or close to the LRU policy. Our experiments show that L2 cache misses are reduced by 12.32% and 19.95% using the profiling-based static and runtime adaptive predictors respectively. © 2011 ACM.