An analytical approach for fast and accurate design space exploration of instruction caches

Application-specific system-on-chip platforms create the opportunity to customize the cache configuration for optimal performance with minimal chip area. Simulation, in particular trace-driven simulation, is widely used to estimate cache hit rates. However, simulation is too slow to be deployed in design space exploration, especially when there are hundreds of design points and the traces are huge. In this article, we propose a novel analytical approach for design space exploration of instruction caches. Given the program control flow graph (CFG) annotated only with basic block and control flow edge execution counts, we first model the cache states at each point of the CFG in a probabilistic manner. Then, we exploit the structural similarities among related cache configurations to estimate the cache hit rates for multiple cache configurations in one pass. Experimental results indicate that our analysis is 28--2,500 times faster compared to the fastest known cache simulator while maintaining high accuracy (0.2% average error) in estimating cache hit rates for a large set of popular benchmarks. Moreover, compared to a state-of-the-art cache design space exploration technique, our approach achieves 304--8,086 times speedup and saves up to 62% (average 7%) energy for the evaluated benchmarks.