Study of Cache Performance on GPGPU

Abstract

General-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) provide tremendous computational and processing power. Despite the latency hiding mechanism, a GPU architecture requires high memory bandwidth and lower latency between computational units and the memory system. For this reason, the current GPU architecture has private L1 caches in each core and a shared L2 cache to increase performance by reducing memory latency. But in some cases, this CPU-like cache design is not suitable for GPGPUs. In this paper, we analyze detailed cache performance related to GPGPU application characteristics, and suggest technical alternatives for the GPGPU architecture as future work.