Skewed caches from a low-power perspective

The common approach to reduce cache conflicts is to in-crease the associativity. From a dynamic power perspective this associativity comes at a high cost. In this paper we present miss ratio performance and a dynamic power com-parison for set-associative caches, a skewed cache and also for a new organization proposed, the elbow cache. The el-bow cache extends the skewed cache organization with a relocation strategy for conflicting blocks. We show that these skewed designs significantly reduce the conflict problems while consuming up to 56 % less dy-namic power than a comparably performing 8-way set as-sociative cache. We believe this to be the strongest case in favor of skewed caches presented so far