Eliminating Cache Conflict Misses through XOR-Based Placement Functions

This paper makes the case for the use of XOR-based placement functions for cache memories. It shows that these XOR-mapping schemes can eliminate many conflict misses for direct-mapped and victim caches and practically all of them for (pseudo) two-way associative organizations. The paper evaluates the performance of XOR-mapping schemes for a number of different cache organizations: direct-mapped, set-associative, victim, hash-rehash, column-associative and skewed-associative. It also proposes novel replacement policies for some of these cache organizations. In particular, it presents a low-cost implementation of a pure LRU replacement policy which demonstrates a significant improvement over the pseudo-LRU replacement previously proposed. The paper shows that for a 8 Kbyte data cache, XOR-mapping schemes approximately halve the miss ratio for two-way associative and column-associative organizations. Skewed-associative caches, which already make use of XOR-mapping functions, can benefit ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Antonio González, Mateo Valero, Nigel P. Topham, Joan-Manuel Parcerisa
• Keywords: Cache Organizations, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICS 1997, Two-way Associative Organizations, XOR-mapping Schemes