Exploiting temporal locality in drowsy cache policies

Technology projections indicate that static power will become a major concern in future generations of high-performance microprocessors. Caches represent a significant percentage of the overall microprocessor die area. Therefore, recent research has concentrated on the reduction of leakage current dissipated by caches. The variety of techniques to control current leakage can be classified as non-state preserving or state preserving. Non-state preserving techniques power off selected cache lines while state preserving place selected lines into a low-power state. Drowsy caches are a recently proposed state-preserving technique. In order to introduce low performance overhead, drowsy caches must be very selective which cache lines are moved to a drowsy state. Past research on cache organization has focused on how best to exploit the temporal locality present in the data stream. In this paper we propose a novel drowsy cache policy called Reuse Most Recently used On (RMRO), which makes use ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CF
• Authors: Salvador Petit, Julio Sahuquillo, Jose M. Such, David R. Kaeli
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Cache Lines, CF 2005, Drowsy Cache, Drowsy Cache Policy