Cache coherence tradeoffs in shared-memory MPSoCs

  • Authors:
  • Mirko Loghi;Massimo Poncino;Luca Benini

  • Affiliations:
  • Università di Verona, Verona, Italy;Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy;Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Shared memory is a common interprocessor communication paradigm for single-chip multiprocessor platforms. Snoop-based cache coherence is a very successful technique that provides a clean shared-memory programming abstraction in general-purpose chip multiprocessors, but there is no consensus on its usage in resource-constrained multiprocessor systems on chips (MPSoCs) for embedded applications. This work aims at providing a comparative energy and performance analysis of cache-coherence support schemes in MPSoCs. Thanks to the use of a complete multiprocessor simulation platform, which relies on accurate technology-homogeneous power models, we were able to explore different cache-coherent shared-memory communication schemes for a number of cache configurations and workloads.