A Partitioning Method of Cooperative Caching with Hit Frequency Counters for Many-Core Processors

The number of processor cores on a chip tends to increase because of the limitation of single thread performance. For many-core architectures, efficient use of last-level cache (LLC) is important. Recent techniques which have been proposed are core-divided LLC and forward an evicted line from one cache to another cache. In this paper, we propose a new cache partitioning scheme of HFC (Hit Frequency Counters), which is inspired by RFF (Reference Frequency Filter), to detect a rarely used cache region. We apply HFC partitioning to a core-divided LLC scheme to have such regions being shared with other cores. Our evaluation shows that the reduction of the number of off chip access over the base partitioning scheme is 5.0% on average and 25.8% at a maximum.