Process variation-aware adaptive cache architecture and management

Madhu Mutyam, Feng Wang, Ramakrishnan Krishnan, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Mahmut Kandemir, Yuan Xie, Mary Jane Irwin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

Fabricating circuits that employ ever-smaller transistors leads to dramatic variations in critical process parameters. This in turn results in large variations in execution/access latencies of different hardware components. This situation is even more severe for memory components due to minimum-sized transistors used in their design. Current design methodologies that are tuned for the worst case scenarios are becoming increasingly pessimistic from the performance angle, and thus, may not be a viable option at all for future designs. This paper makes two contributions targeting on-chip data caches. First, it presents an adaptive cache management policy based on nonuniform cache access. Second, it proposes a latency compensation approach that employs several circuit-level techniques to change the access latency of select cache lines based on the criticalities of the load instructions that access them. Our experiments reveal that both these techniques can recover significant amount of the lost performance due to worst case designs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)865-877
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume58
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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