Effectiveness Evaluation of Replacement Policies for On-Chip Caches in Multiprocessors

A cache plays a vital role in improving performance in the multicore environment, especially the last level cache (LLC). The improvements in performance are based on the block size, associativity, and replacement policies. Most of the papers concentrate on traditional least recently used (LRU)-based replacement policies for their replacement decisions. Unfortunately, the replacement decisions do not enhance performance of the cache as expected. An enhanced modified pseudo LRU policy is proposed, which is an approximation of LRU. The proposed methodology uses counters to enhance the confidence of replacement decisions based on the history of the replaceable blocks in cache. It is very clear from the simulation results that the replacement scheme proposed exhibits better performance improvement in terms of miss ratio of about 3% and energy efficiency of about 2% on average.