An adaptive victim cache scheme

Abstract

A victim cache is a small cache block usually located between two main cache levels, which main objective is to recover conflict cache misses. In the usual case, the victim cache is designed as an always enabled cache block with fixed size. However, different applications may have very different memory access requirements. In this article, we present an analysis of the relations between a victim cache, the cache's logical organization and the application's behaviour, and based on preliminary results, an victim cache scheme which is reconfigured at runtime to adapt to the current conditions of the system is proposed.