Hiding Cache Miss Penalty Using Priority-based Execution for Embedded Processors

—The contribution of memory latency to execution time continues to increase, and latency hiding mechanisms become ever more important for efficient processor design. While high-end processors can use elaborate techniques like multiple issue, out-of-order execution, speculative execution, value prediction etc. to tolerate high memory latencies, they are often not viable solutions for embedded processors, due to significant area, power and chip complexity overheads. This paper proposes a hardware-software cooperative approach, called priority-based execution to hide cache miss penalty for embedded processors. The compiler classifies the instructions into low-priority and highpriority instructions. The processor executes the high-priority instructions, but delays the execution of low priority instructions. They are executed on a cache miss to hide the cache miss penalty. We empirically evaluate our proposal on the Intel XScale compiler and microarchitecture. Experimental results on b...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Sanghyun Park, Aviral Shrivastava, Yunheung Paek
• Keywords: Cache Miss Penalty, DATE 2008, Embedded Processors, Hardware, Latency Hiding Mechanisms