CCCPO: Robust Prefetcher Optimization Technique Based on Cache Convection

One of the significant issues of processor architectureis to overcome memory latency. Prefetching can greatlyimprove cache performance, however, it has the drawback ofcache pollution unless its aggressiveness is properly set. Althoughseveral techniques for prefetcher throttling have been proposedwhich use accuracy as a metric, their robustness were notsufficient due to the variations between program working setsizes and cache capacities.In this paper, we revisit cache behavior with the viwepointof data lifetime in a cache with prefetching. Based on thisobservation Cache-Convection-Control-based Prefetch Optimization(CCCPO) is proposed, which exploits the characteristicsof cache line reuse and controls the prefetcher aggressiveness.Evaluation results showed that this novel approach achieved4.6% improvement against the most recent prefetcher throttlingalgorithms in the geometric mean of SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarksuite with 256KB LLC