Title :
Leveraging Non-Volatile Storage to Achieve Versatile Cache Optimizations
Author :
Rui Wang ; Wangyuan Zhang ; Tao Li ; Depei Qian
Author_Institution :
State Key Lab. of Software Dev. Environ., Beihang Univ., Beijing, China
Abstract :
The efficiency of caches plays a vital role in microprocessor. In this paper, we introduce a novel and flexible cache substrate that employs non-volatile yet versatile SRAM (NV2-SRAM) cell design, which synergistically integrates new memory devices into the standard SRAM cells. Our experiments show that it can achieve a 67 percent energy saving and 3:1x reliability improvement over the SRAM based cache, outperforming the drowsy cache design in terms of both power efficiency and reliability. Moreover, the proposed cache architecture can be used to improve the performance of prefetching schemes by 10 percent.
Keywords :
SRAM chips; cache storage; storage management; NV2-SRAM cell design; SRAM based cache; cache architecture; energy saving; flexible cache substrate; microprocessor; nonvolatile storage; nonvolatile yet versatile SRAM cell design; prefetching schemes; reliability improvement; versatile cache optimizations; Computer architecture; Magnetic tunneling; Microprocessors; Nonvolatile memory; Prefetching; SRAM cells; Cache memories; SRAM; low-power design; memory structures;
Journal_Title :
Computer Architecture Letters
DOI :
10.1109/LCA.2014.2298412