Adaptive block management for victim cache by exploiting L1 cache history information

Abstract

This paper proposes methods for achieving high energy-delay efficiency in the embedded systems. Particularly, we present adaptive block management schemes for victim cache to reduce the number of accesses to more power consuming memory structures such as L2 caches. Victim cache is a memory element for reducing conflict misses in a direct-mapped L1 cache without affecting its access time. We investigate techniques to use victim cache more efficiently by selecting the blocks to be loaded into it based on the L1 cache history information. According to our simulations, proposed schemes show better performance than the conventional victim cache scheme and also reduce the power consumption. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.