Split Ways: An Efficient Replacement Policy for Larger Sized Cache Memory
Purnendu Das1, Bishwa Ranjan Roy2
1Purnendu Das, Department of Computer Science, Assam University Silchar, India.
2Bishwa Ranjan Roy*, Department of Computer Science, Assam University Silchar, India.
Manuscript received on September 22, 2019. | Revised Manuscript received on October 20, 2019. | Manuscript published on October 30, 2019. | PP: 4230-4234 | Volume-9 Issue-1, October 2019 | Retrieval Number: A1634109119/2019©BEIESP | DOI: 10.35940/ijeat.A1634.109119
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: As the data requirement of today’s application is increasing the size of the cache memory in a multicore processor is also increasing. A multicore processor has many levels of cache memory. The Last Level Cache (LLC) is normally shared by all the cores and its size must be large enough to handle today’s data intensive applications. Such larger sized set-associative LLC facing major challenges to efficiently implement the replacement policy of its sets. As the number of ways are increasing in the LLC, the replacement policy becomes a bottleneck of the system. To improve the performance of the system and to reduce the hardware overhead, in this paper we propose a simple but hardware efficient replacement policy for the larger sized LLCs. We call the techniques as Split Ways as it divides (splits) the ways of a set into multiple groups called way Groups. Each way Group maintains its own replacement policy. Experimental analysis using full-system simulator found that the proposed technique reduces the hardware overhead by up to 66% without any performance degradation.
Keywords: Computer Architecture, Cache Memories, Replacement Policies, Hardware Overheads.