Performance and network power evaluation of tightly mixed SRAM NUCA for 3D Multi-core Network on Chips

Abstract

Last level cache (LLC) is crucial for the performance of chip multiprocessors (CMPs), while power is a significant design concern for 3D CMPs. In this paper, we focus on the SRAM-based Non-Uniform Cache Architecture (NUCA) for 3D Multi-core Network-on-Chip (McNoC) systems. A tightly mixed SRAM NUCA for 3D mesh NoC is presented and analyzed. We evaluate the performance and network power with benchmarks based on a full system simulation framework. Experiment results on 16-core 3D NoC systems show that the tightly mixed NUCA could provide up to 31.71% and on average 5.95% performance improvement compared to a base 3D NUCA scheme. The tightly mixed 3D NUCA NoC can reduce network power consumption in 1.07%-15.74% and 9.64% on average compared to a baseline 3D NoCs. Our analysis and experimental results provide a guideline to design efficient 3D NoCs with stacking NUCA.