New Prefetch Technique Design for L2 Cache

The memory system remains a major performance bottleneck in the modern and future architectures. Cache unit design and optimization have become an increasingly important factor in determining the overall system performance. This dissertation focuses on the research of the prefetching technique of L2 Cache. A new prefetch technique (timing stride prefetching, TSP), which is suitable for prefetching at the L2 cache, is proposed. Compared with traditional stride prefetch technique, the TSP's timeliness is improved and its IPC (instructions per cycle) is increased by 8.3%

[1]  Wei-Fen Lin,et al.  Designing a Modern Memory Hierarchy with Hardware Prefetching , 2001, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[2]  J.W.C. Fu,et al.  Stride Directed Prefetching In Scalar Processors , 1992, [1992] Proceedings the 25th Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture MICRO 25.

[3]  Jean-Loup Baer,et al.  The Impact of Timeliness for Hardware-based Prefetching from Main Memory , 1997 .

[4]  Norman P. Jouppi,et al.  Improving direct-mapped cache performance by the addition of a small fully-associative cache and prefetch buffers , 1990, [1990] Proceedings. The 17th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

[5]  Mark J. Charney,et al.  Prefetching and memory system behavior of the SPEC95 benchmark suite , 1997, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[6]  James E. Smith,et al.  Prefetching in supercomputer instruction caches , 1992, Proceedings Supercomputing '92.

[7]  Dirk Grunwald,et al.  Prefetching Using Markov Predictors , 1997, Conference Proceedings. The 24th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

[8]  Josep Torrellas,et al.  Correlation Prefetching with a User-Level Memory Thread , 2003, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[9]  Vikas Agarwal,et al.  Clock rate versus IPC: the end of the road for conventional microarchitectures , 2000, Proceedings of 27th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (IEEE Cat. No.RS00201).

[10]  Michel Dubois,et al.  Sequential Hardware Prefetching in Shared-Memory Multiprocessors , 1995, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..