Evaluation of the impact of Miss Table and victim caches in parallel embedded systems

Abstract

Parallel and distributed solutions are gaining increasing importance in designing embedded systems. Future parallel embedded systems are expected to have several hundred processing cores, improving the performance/power ratio. Multilevel caches in a multicore architecture require huge amount of power and may decrease processing speed due to cache's dynamic behavior. In this work, we investigate the impact of a Miss Table and victim caches at the cache level on performance and power consumption. The Miss Table holds information about the memory blocks those might cause more level-1 cache misses. Victim caches hold level-1 victim blocks. Cache locking algorithm and cache replacement scheme can directly be benefited by using the information stored in Miss Table and victim caches. We simulate a quad-core system with a two-level cache memory subsystem under MPEG4, H.264/AVC, FFT, and MI workloads. Experimental results show that the addition of the Miss Table and victim caches reduces the mean delay per task and the total power consumption by 32% and 41%, respectively.