A Study of Reconfigurable Split Data Caches and Instruction Caches

In this paper we show that cache memories for embedded applications can be designed to both increase performance and reduce energy consumed. We show that using separate (data) caches for indexed or stream data and scalar data items can lead to substantial improvements in terms of cache misses. The sizes of the various cache structure should be customized to meet applications’ needs. We show that reconfigurable split data caches can be designed to meet wide-ranging embedded applications’ performance, energy and silicon area budgets. The optimal cache organizations can lead to on average 62% and 49% reduction in the overall cache size, 37% and 21% reduction in cache access time and 47% and 52% reduction in power consumption for instruction and data cache respectively when compared to an 8k byte instruction and an 8k byte unified data cache for media benchmarks from MiBench suite.

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