General

The design trend of caches in modern processors continues to in-crease their capacity with higher associativity to cope with large data footprint and take advantage of feature size shrink, which, un-fortunately, also leads to higher energy consumption. This paper presents a technique using segmented counting Bloom filters called “Way Guard ” to reduce the number of redundant way lookups in large set-associative caches to achieve dynamic energy savings. Our Way Guard mechanism only looks up an average of 25-30% of the cache ways and saved up to 65 % of the L2 energy and up to 70 % of the L1 cache energy