Reducing memory latency via non-blocking and prefetching caches

Abstract

Non-blocking caches and prefetehing caches are two techniques for hiding memory latency by exploiting the overlap of processor computations with data accesses. A nonblocking cache allows execution to proceed concurrently with cache misses as long as dependency constraints are observed, thus exploiting post-miss operations, A prefetching cache generates prefetch requests to bring data in the cache before it is actually needed, thus allowing overlap with premiss computations.