An energy-efficient adaptive hybrid cache

Abstract

By reconfiguring part of the cache as software-managed scratchpad memory (SPM), hybrid caches manage to handle both unknown and predictable memory access patterns. However, existing hybrid caches provide a flexible partitioning of cache and SPM without considering adaptation to the run-time cache behavior. Previous cache set balancing techniques are either energy-inefficient or require serial tag and data array access. In this paper an adaptive hybrid cache is proposed to dynamically remap SPM blocks from high-demand cache sets to low-demand cache sets. This achieves 19%, 25%, 18% and 18% energy-runtime-production reductions over four previous representative techniques on a wide range of benchmarks.