Location Cache Design And Performance Analysis For Chip Multiprocessors

As it becomes increasingly difficult to improve the performance of a microprocessor by simply increasing its clock speed, chip makers are looking towards parallelism in the form of Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) to increase performance. Indeed, recent research at Intel suggests that chips with hundreds of cores are possible in the not-so-distant future. As the number of cores grows, so does the size of the cache systems required to allow them to operate efficiently. Caches have grown to consume a significant percentage of the power utilized by a processor. In this research, we extend the concept of a location cache to support CMP systems in combination with low-power L2 caches based upon the gated-ground technique. The combination of these two techniques allows for reductions in both dynamic and leakage power consumption. In this work we will present an analysis of the power savings provided by utilizing location caches in a CMP system. The performance of the cache system is evaluated by extending the capability of CACTI and Simics using the SPLASH-2 and ALPBench benchmark suites. These simulation results demonstrate that the utilization of location caches in CMP systems is capable of saving a significant amount of power over equivalent CMP systems that lack location caches.