Quantitative Comparison of Set-Associative and Victim Caches

As processors become faster, memory performance becomes a serious bottleneck. In recent years memory speeds have failed to keep up with processor speeds and the gap has been steadily increasing. Cache performance has become a critical parameter in system performance. Several methods have been proposed to improve cache performances. One such technique that aims at reducing the cache miss rate, without affecting the hit rate is using what are called "victim caches". Victim caches are small fully associative caches placed between a cache and its refill path. Misses served by the victim caches have only a very small miss penalty, typically one cycle, as opposed to several cycles for main memory. A small victim cache along with a direct mapped primary cache is expected to significantly improve the 1 cache hit-rate. This project was aimed at a quantitative comparison of set-associative caches and directmapped caches together with a victim cache. We verified Jouppi's [Jou90] clai..