Limiting the number of dirty cache lines

Abstract—Caches often employ write-back instead of writethrough, since write-back avoids unnecessary transfers for multiple writes to the same block. For several reasons, however, it is undesirable that a significant number of cache lines will be marked “dirty”. Energy-efficient cache organizations, for example, often apply techniques that resize, reconfigure, or turn off (parts of) the cache. In such cache organizations, dirty lines have to be written back before the cache is reconfigured. The delay imposed by these write-backs or the required additional logic and buffers can significantly reduce the attained energy savings. A cache organization called the clean/dirty cache (CDcache) is proposed that combines the properties of write-back and write-through. It avoids unnecessary transfers for recurring writes, while restricting the number of dirty lines to a hard limit. Detailed experimental results show that the CD-cache reduces the number of dirty lines significantly, whi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Pepijn J. de Langen, Ben H. H. Juurlink
• Keywords: Avoids Unnecessary Transfers, Cache, Cache Organization, DATE 2009, Hardware