Power-aware partitioned cache architectures

This paper focuses on partitioning the cache resources architecturally for energy and energy-delay optimizations. Specifically, we investigate ways of splitting the cache into several smaller units, each of which is a cache by itself (called subcache). Subcache architectures not only reduce the per-access energy costs but can potentially improve the locality behavior as well. We present a unified framework for designing, implementing and evaluating different subcache architectures. Different techniques for data placement, subcache prediction, and selective probing are proposed and evaluated using a diverse set of applications. The results show that intelligent subcache mechanisms proposed in this paper are effective.