EMISSARY: Enhanced Miss Awareness Replacement Policy for L2 Instruction Caching

Nayana Prasad Nagendra, Atmn Patel, Jared Stark, Bhargav Reddy Godala, Svilen Kanev, Gilles A. Pokam, David I. August, Ishita Chaturvedi, Tipp Moseley, Simone Campanoni

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

For decades, architects have designed cache replacement policies to reduce cache misses. Since not all cache misses affect processor performance equally, researchers have also proposed cache replacement policies focused on reducing the total miss cost rather than the total miss count. However, all prior cost-aware replacement policies have been proposed specifically f or d ata caching and are either inappropriate or unnecessarily complex for instruction caching. This paper presents EMISSARY, the first cost-aware cache replacement family of policies specifically designed for instruction caching. Observing that modern architectures entirely tolerate many instruction cache misses, EMISSARY resists evicting those cache lines whose misses cause costly decode starvations. In the context of a modern processor with fetch-directed instruction prefetching and other aggressive front-end features, EMISSARY applied to L2 cache instructions delivers an impressive 3.24% geomean speedup (up to 23.7%) and a geomean energy savings of 2.1% (up to 17.7%) when evaluated on widely used server applications with large code footprints. This speedup is 21.6% of the total speedup obtained by an unrealizable L2 cache with a zero-cycle miss latency for all capacity and conflict instruction misses.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationISCA 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages869-881
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9798400700958
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 17 2023
Event50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2023 - Orlando, United States
Duration: Jun 17 2023Jun 21 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture
ISSN (Print)1063-6897

Conference

Conference50th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityOrlando
Period6/17/236/21/23

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture

Keywords

  • Cache Microarchitecture
  • Cache Replacement Policy
  • Cost-Aware Replacement Policy
  • Instruction Caching

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