A reusability-aware cache memory sharing technique for high-performance low-power CMPs with private L2 caches

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) emerge as a dominant architectural alternative in high-end embedded systems. Since off-chip accesses require a long latency and consume a large amount of power, CMPs are typically based on multiple levels of on-chip cache memories. To meet the performance demand and power budget, an efficient support for memory hierarchy is important. We propose an on-chip L2 cache organization which takes advantage of both a private L2 cache and a shared L2 cache to improve the performance and reduce energy consumption. Our L2 cache organization is based on a private L2 cache organization which has the short access latency. When a cache block in the private L2 cache is selected for an eviction, our proposed organization first evaluates the reusability of the cache block. If the cache block is likely to be reused, we save the evicted cache block in one of peer L2 caches which may have efficiently invalid blocks. By selectively writing evicted cache blocks to peer L2 caches, the proposed L2 cache organization can effectively simulate a shared L2 cache. Experimental results using a CMP simulator showed that the proposed L2 cache organization improved the average memory latency by up to 27% and reduced energy consumption by up to 16.6% over a 256KB private L2 cache organization for the SPLASH2 benchmark programs..