High-endurance and performance-efficient design of hybrid cache architectures through adaptive line replacement

  • Authors:
  • Amin Jadidi;Mohammad Arjomand;Hamid Sarbazi-Azad

  • Affiliations:
  • Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran;Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran;Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th IEEE/ACM international symposium on Low-power electronics and design
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a run-time strategy for managing writes onto last level cache in chip multiprocessors where STT-RAM memory is used as baseline technology. To this end, we assume that each cache set is decomposed into limited SRAM lines and large number of STT-RAM lines. SRAM lines are target of frequently-written data and rarely-written or read-only ones are pushed into STT-RAM. As a novel contribution, a low-overhead, fully-hardware technique is utilized to detect write-intensive data blocks of working set and place them into SRAM lines while the remaining data blocks are candidates to be remapped onto STT-RAM blocks during system operation. Therefore, the achieved cache architecture has large capacity and consumes near zero leakage energy using STT-RAM array; while dynamic write energy, acceptable write latency, and long lifetime is guaranteed via SRAM array. Results of full-system simulation for a quad-core CMP running PARSEC-2 benchmark suit confirm an average of 49 times improvement in cache lifetime and more than 50% reduction in cache power consumption when compared to baseline configurations.