Method and Apparatus for Burst-Based Level-One Cache Dead Block Prediction, and Associated Replacement, Bypassing, and Prefetching

Introduction

Both level-one and level-two caches are highly underutilized, containing mostly dead data that will never again be used before being thrown out of the cache. This low utilization results in unnecessary power, energy, and area overheads, while also being a lost opportunity for higher performance if caches were better utilized. The proposed invention increases the utilization of the cache, enabling more live blocks to be stored in them at any given time, reducing cache misses and increasing performance.

Benefits

• Permits near-perfect (96% accuracy, 96% coverage, average over a range of benchmarks) prediction of dead blocks in the level-one data cache
• Permits very effective prefetching, nearly doubling the effective utilization of the cache and providing a 10% performance boost over a system that does prefetching but no dead-block prediction

Market Potential/Applications

High performance and low power data processing systems

For further information please contact

University of Texas,
Austin, USA
Website : www.otc.utexas.edu