A majority-based control scheme for way-adaptable caches

Considering the trade-off between performance and power consumption has become significantly important in microprocessor design. For this purpose, one promising approach is to employ way-adaptable caches, which adjust the number of cache ways available to a running application based on assessment of its working set size. However, in a very short period, the estimated working set size by cache access locality assessment may become different from that of the overall trend in a long period. Such a locality assessment result will cause excessive adaptation to allocate too many cache ways to a thread and, as a result, deteriorate the energy efficiency of way-adaptable caches. To avoid the excessive adaptation, this paper proposes a majority-based control scheme, in which the number of activated ways is adjusted based on majority voting of locality assessment results of several short sampling periods. By using majority voting, the proposed scheme can make way-adaptable caches less sensitive to the results of the periods including exceptional behaviors. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme can reduce the number of activated ways by up to 37% and on average by 9.4%, while maintaining performance compared with a conventional scheme, resulting in reduction of power consumption.