Cache Promotion Policy Using Re-reference Interval Prediction

The last-level cache (LLC) mitigates the long latencies of memory access in today´s chip multi-core processor (CMP). The promotion policy in the LLC largely affects cache efficiency, while an inappropriate promotion policy may lead useless blocks to remain in the cache longer than necessary, in turn result into inefficiency. Currently state-of-the-art promotion policies are unaware of the re-reference interval of cache accesses. Applications that exhibit a long re-reference interval perform poorly with these promotion policies. In this paper, we propose a promotion policy that uses re-reference interval prediction (RRIP) information. Such technique requires minor hardware modification over the least-recently-used (LRU) replacement policy. Our evaluation shows that RRIP improves IPC_sum by 2.58%, Weighted Speedup by 3.54% and IPC_{norm_hmean} by 6.2% on average over single-step promotion policy.