Locality vs. criticality

Abstract

Current memory hierarchies exploit locality of references to reduce load latency and thereby improve processor performance. Locality based schemes aim at reducing the number of cache misses and tend to ignore the nature of misses. This leads to a potential mis-match between load latency requirements and latencies realized using a traditional memory system. To bridge this gap, we partition loads as critical and non-critical. A load that needs to complete early to prevent processor stalls is classified as critical, while a load that can tolerate a long latency is considered non-critical.