Performance Analysis of Multicore Processor Architectures Based On Cache Size Effects

In order to overcome the complexity and performance limit problems of superscalar processors, the multicore architecture has been prevalent recently. The configuration and the size of instruction and data caches greatly gives effect on the performance of multicore processors. Using SPEC 2000 benchmarks as input, the trace-driven simulation has been performed for the 2-core to 16-core architectures with different sizes of caches extensively. As a result, the 2-way set associative instruction and data cache with the size of 64KB brought the best cost-effective performance.