An Energy Efficient 32-nm 20-MB Shared On-Die L3 Cache for Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 Family

An energy efficient on-die 20-way set associative L3 cache of size 20 MB for the Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family is presented. It is manufactured in the Intel's 32-nm second generation of high-K dielectric metal gate process with 9-copper metal layers. The L3 cache design uses 0.2119 um 2 cell for the high density big array and 0.2725 um 2cell for the high performance smaller arrays. The power efficiency was achieved by employing advanced power saving schemes and effective Vccmin design techniques. The proposed L3 cache topology seamlessly supports a high density modular and energy efficient designs. The effective and rich redundancy design improves both yield and low voltage operations. The L3 cache achieves more than 20-40% energy efficiency when compared to previous generations and demonstrates wide operating ranges from 1.2 GHz at below 0.7 V to greater than 4.0 GHz at above 1.0 V.

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