An adaptive, non-uniform cache structure for wire-delay dominated on-chip caches

Growing wire delays will force substantive changes in the designs of large caches. Traditional cache architectures assume that each level in the cache hierarchy has a single, uniform access time. Increases in on-chip communication delays will make the hit time of large on-chip caches a function of a line's physical location within the cache. Consequently, cache access times will become a continuum of latencies rather than a single discrete latency. This non-uniformity can be exploited to provide faster access to cache lines in the portions of the cache that reside closer to the processor. In this paper, we evaluate a series of cache designs that provides fast hits to multi-megabyte cache memories. We first…