Reducing cache misses through cache line overlapping

By studying the behaviour of general programmes, it was observed that over 50% of bytes in a data cache are zero-valued. To reduce this waste of zero-valued spaces in a data cache, an overlapped cache scheme, which allows one cache line entry to hold up to two cache lines, is proposed. Experimental results show that, for SPEC2000 benchmarks, the proposed design reduces cache misses by 29% on average over a conventional direct-mapped cache.