• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2010

Recently, processor performance has been improved dramatically. Unfortunately, as the process technology scales down, energy consumption in a processor increases significantly whereas the processor performance continues to improve. Moreover, peak temperature in the processor increases dramatically due to the increased power density, resulting in serious thermal problem. For this reason, performance, energy consumption and thermal problem should be considered together when designing up-to-date processors. This paper proposes three modified filter cache schemes to alleviate the thermal problem in the filter cache, which is one of the most energy-efficient design techniques in the hierarchical memory systems : Bypass Filter Cache (BFC), Duplicated Filter Cache (DFC) and Partitioned Filter Cache (PFC). BFC scheme enables the direct access to the L1 cache when the temperature on the filter cache exceeds the threshold, leading to reduced temperature on the filter cache. DFC scheme lowers temperature on the filter cache by appending an additional filter cache to the existing filter cache. The filter cache for PFC scheme is composed of two half-size filter caches to lower the temperature on the filter cache by reducing the access frequency. According to our simulations using Wattch and Hotspot, the proposed partitioned filter cache shows the lowest peak temperature on the filter cache, leading to higher reliability in the processor.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.9-16
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• 2009

Energy consumption as well as performance should be considered when designing up-to-date multicore processors. In this paper, we propose new design technique to reduce the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by using modified filter cache. The filter cache has been recognized as one of the most energy-efficient design techniques for singlecore processors. The energy consumed in the instruction cache accounts for a significant portion of total processor energy consumption. Therefore, energy-aware instruction cache design techniques are essential to reduce the energy consumption in a multicore processor. The proposed technique reduces the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by reducing the number of accesses to the level-1 instruction cache. We evaluate the proposed design using a simulation infrastructure based on SimpleScalar and CACTI. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture reduces the energy consumption in the instruction cache for multicore processors by up to 3.4% compared to the conventional filter cache architecture. Moreover, the proposed architecture shows better performance over the conventional filter cache architecture.