A compressed memory hierarchy using an indirect index cache

• Authors: Erik G. Hallnor;Steven K. Reinhardt
• Venue: WMPI '04 Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Memory performance issues: in conjunction with the 31st international symposium on computer architecture
• Year: 2004

The large and growing impact of memory hierarchies on overall system performance compels designers to investigate innovative techniques to improve memory-system efficiency. We propose and analyze a memory hierarchy that increases both the effective capacity of memory structures and the effective bandwidth of interconnects by storing and transmitting data in compressed form.Caches play a key role in hiding memory latencies. However, cache sizes are constrained by die area and cost. A cache's effective size can be increased by storing compressed data, if the storage unused by a compressed block can be allocated to other blocks. We use a modified Indirect Index Cache to allocate variable amounts of storage to different blocks, depending on their compressibility.By coupling our compressed cache design with a similarly compressed main memory, we can easily transfer data between these structures in a compressed state, increasing the effective memory bus bandwidth. This optimization further improves performance when bus bandwidth is critical.Our simulation results, using the SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks, show that our design increases performance by up to 225% on some benchmarks while degrading performance in general by no more than 2%, other than a 12% decrease on a single benchmark. Compressed bus transfers alone account for up to 80% of this improvement, with the remainder coming from increased effective cache capacity. As memory latencies increase, our design becomes even more beneficial.