Cache Management by Using Conflict Prediction Method

A method to predict block conflicts in direct mapped caches is proposed,which is based on the block replacement behavior.Accordingly,a cache scheme named Conflict Prediction(CP) Cache is presented.Its architecture contains a direct mapped cache and a small fully associative cache,and a conflict prediction table(CPT) which dynamically decides the allocation of fetched blocks from next memory hierarchy.SPEC95 Simulation results show that the performance of CP cache is always better than the traditional direct mapped cache with twice the size of CP cache.With the same block size of 32 bytes,the average improvement of miss ratio of (8+1)kB CP cache with 8 entry CPT is about 12.2% over the traditional 16kB direct mapped cache.By comparison with other similar architectures such as NTS cache and PCS cache,CP cache not only requires less hardware tradeoff and simpler control but also improves hit ratio and bus traffic.