Survey on Memory Hierarchies – Basic Design and Cache Optimization Techniques

Abstract- In this paper we provide a comprehensive survey of the past and current work of Memory hierarchies and optimizations with a focus on cache optimizations. Firstly we discuss various types of memory hierarchies and basic optimizations possible. Then we shift our focus on cache optimizations and discuss the motivation for doing this survey on the same. Then we discuss different types of cache memories and their mapping policies. Further to avoid various categories of cache misses and achieve high performance and low energy consumption we discuss different basic and advance cache optimizations. Moving further we’ll be discussing about other basic and advance cache optimizations techniques like Trace caches [12] and other optimization techniques. We then compare between the various cache optimizations discussed above and also discuss a few novel memory hierarchies and cache optimizations deviating from the conventional hierarchies like the Dynamic Memory Hierarchy Performance Optimization [6] and Way- Predicting Set-Associative cache for High Performance and Low energy consumption [7]. Lastly we discuss few open and challenging issues faced in various cache optimization techniques