Don't use the page number, but a pointer to it

Abstract

Most newly announced high performance microprocessors support 64-bit virtual addresses and the width of physical addresses is also growing. As a result, the size of the address tags in the L1 cache is increasing. The impact of on chip area is particularly dramatic when small block sizes are used. At the same time, the performance of high performance microprocessors depends more and more on the accuracy of branch prediction and for reasons similar to those in the case of caches the size of the Branch Target Buffer is also increasing linearly with the address width.In this paper, we apply the simple principle stated in the title for limiting the tag size of on-chip caches. In the resulting indirect-tagged cache, the duplication of the page number in processors (in TLB and in cache tags) is removed. The tag check is then simplified and the tag cost does not depend on the address width. Applying the same principle to Branch Target Buffers, we propose the Reduced Branch Target Buffer. The storage size in a Reduced Branch Target Buffer does not depend on the address width and is dramatically smaller than the size of the conventional implementation of a Branch Target Buffer.