An overview of modern cache memory and performance analysis of replacement policies

Memory hierarchy in current generation computers is formed by keeping registers inside, cache on or outside the processor and virtual memory on Hard disk. The principle of locality of reference is used to make memory hierarchy work efficiently. In recent years various advances have been made to improve the cache memory performance on the basis of hit rate, latency, speed, replacement policies and energy consumption. Cache replacement policy is one of the important design parameter which affects the overall processor performance and also become more important with recent technological moves towards highly associative cache. This paper yields a survey of current generation processors on the basis of various factors effecting cache memory performance and throughput. The main focus of this paper is the study and performance analysis of the cache replacement policies on the basis of simulation on several benchmarks.