A new cache architecture based on temporal and spatial locality

A data cache system is designed as low-power/high-performance cache structure for embedded processors. Direct-mapped cache is a favorite choice for short cycle time, but suffers from high miss rate. Hence the proposed dual data cache is an approach to improve the miss ratio of direct-mapped cache without affecting this access time. The proposed cache system can exploit temporal and spatial localities effectively by maximizing the effective cache memory space for any given cache size. The proposed cache system consists of two caches, i.e., a direct-mapped cache with small block size and a fully associative spatial buffer with large block size. Temporal locality is utilized by caching candidate small blocks selectively into the direct-mapped cache, Also spatial locality can be utilized aggressively by fetching multiple neighboring small blocks whenever a cache miss occurs. According to the results of comparison and analysis, similar performance can be achieved by using four times smaller cache size compared with the conventional direct-mapped cache. It is shown that power consumption of the proposed cache can be reduced by around 4% compared with the victim cache configuration. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.