Quantitative Comparison of Set-Associative and Victim Caches : Proposal

As processors become faster, memory hierarchy 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. Victim caches are small fully associative caches placed between a cache and its refill path. This results in the misses served by the victim caches, having only a very small miss penalty, typically one cycle, as opposed to several cycles for main memory. Small victim caches from one to five line sizes are sufficient to significantly improve the effective cache hit rate. This improvement however is sub-linear in the size of the victim cache and can be poorer for set associative caches. We propose to do a quantitative comparison of set-associative caches and direct-mapped caches together with a victim cache. In particular we aim to find the "associativity " of a direct-mapped cache with a victim cache. This would ..