Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract

Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition Volume I (DATE'04)   p. 10142
A Self-Tuning Cache Architecture for Embedded Systems
Chuanjun Zhang, University of California at Riverside
Frank Vahid, University of California at Riverside
Roman Lysecky, University of California at Riverside

Full Article Text:

DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/DATE.2004.1268840
Send link to a friend

Abstract
Memory accesses can account for about half of a microprocessor system’s power consumption. Customizing a microprocessor cache’s total size, line size and associativity to a particular program is well known to have tremendous benefits for performance and power. Customizing caches has until recently been restricted to core-based flows, in which a new chip will be fabricated. However, several configurable cache architectures have been proposed recently for use in pre-fabricated microprocessor platforms. Tuning those caches to a program is still however a cumbersome task left for designers, assisted in part by recent computer-aided design (CAD) tuning aids. We propose to move that CAD on-chip, which can greatly increase the acceptance of configurable caches. We introduce on-chip hardware implementing an efficient cache tuning heuristic that can automatically, transparently, and dynamically tune the cache to an executing program. We carefully designed the heuristic to avoid any cache flushing, since flushing is power and performance costly. By simulating numerous Powerstone and MediaBench benchmarks, we show that such a dynamic self-tuning cache can reduce memory-access energy by 45% to 55% on average, and as much as 97%, compared with a four-way set-associative base cache, completely transparently to the programmer.
Back to Top Additional Information
Index Terms- Cache, configurable, architecture tuning, low power, low energy, embedded systems, on-chip CAD, dynamic optimization Citation:  Chuanjun Zhang, Frank Vahid, Roman Lysecky, "A Self-Tuning Cache Architecture for Embedded Systems," date, p. 10142,  Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition Volume I (DATE'04),  2004