The case for SRAM main memory

Authors:
Philip Machanick
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Venue:
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
Year:
1996

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Abstract

The growing CPU-memory gap is resulting in increasingly large cache sizes. As cache sizes increase, associativity becomes less of a win. At the same time, since costs of going to DRAM increase, it becomes more valuable to be able to pin critical data in the cache---a problem if a cache is direct-mapped or has a low degree of associativity. Something else which is a problem for caches of low associativity is reducing misses by using a better replacement policy. This paper proposes that L2 cache sizes are now starting to reach the point where it makes more sense to manage them as the main memory of the computer, and relegate the traditional DRAM main memory to the role of a paging device. The paper details advantages of an SRAM main memory, as well as problems that need to be solved, in managing an extra level of virtual to physical translation.