Runtime identification of cache conflict misses: The adaptive miss buffer

This paper describes the miss classification table, a simple mechanism that enables the processor or memory controller to identify each cache miss as either a conflict miss or a capacity (non-conflict) miss. The miss classification table works by storing part of the tag of the most recently evicted line of a cache set. If the next miss to that cache set has a matching tag, it is identified as a conflict miss. This technique correctly identifies 88% of misses. Several applications of this information are demonstrated, including improvements to victim caching, next-line prefetching, cache exclusion, and a pseudo-associative cache. This paper also presents the adaptive miss buffer (AMB), which combines several of these techniques, targeting each miss with the most appropriate optimization, all within a single small miss buffer. The AMB's combination of techniques achieves 16% better performance than any single technique alone.