In this report we compare the cost and performance of a new kind of restricted instruction cache architecture -- the stall cache -- against several other conventional cache architectures. The stall cache minimizes the size of an on-chip instruction cache by caching only those instructions whose instruction fetch phase collides with the memory access phase of a preceding load or store instruction.
Many existing machines provide a single cycle external cache memory. Our results show that, under this assumption, the stall cache always outperforms an equivalent sized on-chip instruction cache, reducing external memory access stalls by approximately 10%. In addition we present results for a system using an on-chip data cache, and for one with a double width data bus and short instruction prefetch buffer.
Title
Evaluation of a "Stall" Cache: An Efficient Restricted On-chip Instruction Cache
Published
1991-07-30
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
CSD-91-641
Type
Text
Extent
19 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
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