Dynamic techniques to reduce memory traffic in embedded systems
Proceedings of the 1st conference on Computing frontiers
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The dual data cache is a cache organization with a splittemporal/spatial cache. The temporal sub-cache stores dataexhibiting temporal locality and the spatial sub-cache savesdata exhibiting spatial locality. A locality prediction tableis used to predict the type of locality load/store instructionsexhibit. In this way, both types of locality can be exploitedmore effectively. Unfortunately, the dual data cache doesnot make effective use of the entire cache capacity. If mostmemory references exhibit the same type of locality, onlyone sub-cache will be used. In this paper we, therefore,propose a cache organization called the Unified Dual DataCache that employs only one (unified) cache unit. If a cachemiss occurs and the locality prediction is temporal, only themissing block is fetched from the next memory level. If onthe other hand spatial locality is predicted, adjacent blocksare also brought to the cache. In fact, we present two versionsof the UDDC called the UDDC Type A (UDDC-A)and the UDDC Type B (UDDC-B), respectively. The differencebetween the two types is that in the UDDC-B eachsmaller block is tagged, while in the UDDC-A the smallerblocks within a larger block share the tag.