Wire delays and leakage energy consumption are both growing problems in designing large on-chip caches. Nonuniform cache architecture (NUCA) is a wire-delay aware design paradigm based on the sub-banking of a cache, which allows the banks closer to the controller to be accessed with reduced latencies with respect to the other banks. This feature is leveraged by dynamic NUCA (D-NUCA) caches via a migration mechanism which speeds up frequently used data access, further reducing the effect wire delays have on performance. To reduce leakage power consumption of static random access memory caches, various micro-architectural techniques have been proposed. In this brief, we compare the benefits and limits of the application of some of these techniques to a D-NUCA cache memory, and propose a novel hybrid scheme based on the Drowsy and Way Adaptable techniques. Such a scheme allows further improvement in leakage reduction and limits the impact of process variation on the effectiveness of the Drowsy technique.

Advances in technology of semiconductor make nowadays possible to design Chip Multiprocessor Systems equipped with huge on-chip Last Level Caches. Due to the wire delay problem, the use of traditional cache memories with a uniform access time would result in unacceptable response latencies. NUCA (Non Uniform Cache Access) architecture has been proposed as a viable solution to hide the adverse impact of wires delay on performance. Many previous studies have focused on the effectiveness of NUCA architectures, but the study of the energy and power aspects of NUCA caches is still limited. In this work, we present an energy model specifically suited for NUCA-based CMP systems, together with a methodology to employ the model to evaluate the NUCA energy consumption. Moreover, we present a performance and energy dissipation analysis for two 8-core CMP systems with an S-NUCA and a D-NUCA, respectively. Experimental results show that, similarly to the monolithic processor, the static power also dominates the total power budget in the CMP system.

D-NUCA L2 caches are able to tolerate the increasing wire delay effects due to technology scaling thanks to their banked organization, broadcast line search and data promotion/demotion mechanism. Data promotion mechanism aims at moving frequently accessed data near the core, but causes additional accesses on cache banks, hence increasing dynamic energy consumption. We shown how, in some cases, this migration mechanism is not successful in reducing data access latency and can be selectively and dynamically inhibited, thus reducing dynamic energy consumption without affecting performances.

D-NUCA caches are cache memories that, thanks to banked organization, broadcast search and promotion/demotion mechanism, are able to tolerate the increasing wire delay effects introduced by technology scaling. As a consequence, they will outperform conventional caches (UCA, Uniform CacheArchitectures) in future generation cores. Due to the promotion/ demotion mechanism, we observed that the distribution of hits across the ways of a D-NUCA cache varies across applications as well as across different execution phases within a single application. In this work, we show how such a behavior can be leveraged to improve the D-NUCA power efficiency as well as to decrease its access latency.In particular, we propose: 1) A new micro-architectural technique to reduce the static power consumption of a D-NUCA cache by dynamically adapting the number of active (i.e. powered-on) ways to the need of the running application; our evaluation shows that a strong reduction of the average number of active ways (37.1%) is achievable, without significantly affecting the IPC (-2.83%), leading to a resultant reduction of the Energy Delay Product (EDP) of 30.9%. 2) A strategy to estimate the characteristic parameters of the proposed technique. 3) An evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed technique in the multicore environment.

Non uniform cache architectures (NUCA) are a novel design paradigm for large last-level on-chip caches that has been introduced to deliver low access latencies in wire delay dominated environments. Their structure is partitioned into sub-banks and the resulting access latency is a function of the physical position of the requested data. Typically, to connect the different sub-banks and the cache controller, NUCA caches employ a switched network, made up of links and routers with buffered queues; the characteristics of such switched network may affect the performance of the entire system. This work analyzes how different parameters for the routers, namely cut-through latency and buffering capacity, affect the overall performance of NUCA based systems for the single processor case, assuming a reference organization proposed in literature. The results indicate that the sensitivity of the system to the cut-through latency is very high and that limited buffering capacity is sufficient to achieve a good performance level. As a consequence, we propose an alternative NUCA organization that limits the average number of hops experienced by cache accesses. This organization is better performing in most of the cases and scales better as the cut-through latency increases, thus simplifying the implementation of routers.