Analytical Evaluation of Energy and Throughput for Multilevel Caches

With the increase of processor-memory performance gap, it has become important to gauge the performance of cache architectures so as to evaluate their impact on energy requirement and throughput of the system. Multilevel caches are found to be increasingly prevalent in the high-end processors. Additionally, the recent drive towards multicore systems has necessitated the use of multilevel cache hierarchies for shared memory architectures. This paper presents simplified and accurate mathematical models to estimate the energy consumption and the impact on throughput for multilevel caches for single core systems.