SSDC: A Split Data Cache Design for Sequential Access Intensive Applications

Abstract Caches are widely used to reduce the speed gap between processors and memories. However, the spatial locality of sequential data accesses existing in many popular applications is not well exploited by conventional data cache. In response to these problems, the Split Sequential Data Cache (SSDC) is proposed, in which the sequential access detector can predict whether data accesses are sequential, and direct them to the right sub cache. Experiments show that the SSDC outperforms the conventional data cache and other schemes. It reduces the miss rate of applications with intensive sequential data accesses with only a little increment of bandwidth requirement. Meanwhile, the experimental results on SPEC2000Int show that SSDC does not hurt the performance of applications without large sequential accesses. Key words computer architecture; cache design; split data cache; sequential data acces