• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.1-13
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• 2009

Filter cache has been introduced as one solution of reducing cache power consumption. More than 50% of the power reduction results from the filter cache, whereas more than 20% of the performance is compromised. To minimize the performance degradation of the filter cache, the predictive filter cache has been proposed. In this paper, we review the previous filter cache predictors and analyze the problems of the solutions. As a result, we found main problems that cause prediction misses in previous filter cache schemes and, to resolve the problems, this paper proposes a new prediction policy. In our scheme, some reference bit entries, called MSBs, are inserted into filter cache and BTB, to adaptively control the filter cache access. In simulation parts, we use a modified SimpleScalar simulator with MiBench benchmark programs to verify the proposed filter cache. The simulation result shows in average 5% performance improvement, compared to previous ones.