Separating conflict misses to reduce miss-rate of caches through an unified replacement policy

Abstract

The limited memory space of caches are used in unbalanced way, which generate more conflict misses in some sets while other sets are underutilized. We propose a technique using the tag of address through Hash Functions to address the most underutilized sets in the cache to replace. Therefore, conflict misses in the cache can be resolved by distributing accesses along cache sets evenly. In comparison with the previous techniques that aim to balance cache, this technique doesn't need to consume much energy per access; and less than 2% extra energy will be consumed, in each miss.