Lessons from Experimental Methodology of Cache Hierarchy Changes with the Memory Technology

Abstract

Caching is an important technique to improve computer system performance by storing the most recently used data and instructions for main memory. Cache is widely used in modern computer systems and will continue to be an irreplaceable unit to narrow the speed gap between processor and main memory. With the increasing capacity of main memory and the number of processor cores, the cache technology has great development. In this paper, we have some lessons of cache hierarchy changes with the memory technology from experimental methodology. We design a serial of experiments and try to answer some questions about cache designs. Our experiments results indicate that more levels of cache does not necessarily means better performance for all benchmarks, that last level cache miss rate has no direct connection with the system performance, that the average performance of exclusive cache hierarchy is more effective than that of inclusive cache.