Object-aware cache: higher hit-ratio in object-oriented ASIPs

At any point in time in an object-oriented (OO) program, a class method is running whose set of unconditionally accessed data fields can be statically determined. We propose to fetch this set prior to or during the method execution to increase the data cache hit-ratio. This requires that either the software directs the processor cache controller, or the processor is aware of the currently running class method. We follow the latter approach by extending our previous work where we introduced the object-oriented application-specific instruction processor (OO-ASIP) as a processor whose instruction-set consist of methods of a class library. Such an OO-ASIP is aware of the currently running method and can there re prefetch the unconditionally accessed data fields of the called object to the cache. This is a "directed" hardware prefetching policy compared to "speculative" (pre)fetching of traditional caches. We develop formulas for the hit-ratio and show that this approach results in higher hit-ratio than a traditional cache.