Touch\'e: Towards Ideal and Efficient Cache Compression By Mitigating Tag Area Overheads
Seokin Hong, Bulent Abali, Alper Buyuktosunoglu, Michael B. Healy, and, Prashant J. Nair

TL;DR
Touché introduces a hardware framework that allows storing multiple arbitrary compressed cache blocks in a cacheline without tag overheads, significantly improving cache efficiency and speed.
Contribution
It presents a novel hardware-based approach with SIGN, TADA, and SMARK mechanisms to eliminate tag overheads and enable flexible cache block placement.
Findings
Achieves 12% average speedup over uncompressed cache
Enables storing multiple compressed blocks without tag overheads
Reduces false positives in signature matching
Abstract
Compression is seen as a simple technique to increase the effective cache capacity. Unfortunately, compression techniques either incur tag area overheads or restrict data placement to only include neighboring compressed cache blocks to mitigate tag area overheads. Ideally, we should be able to place arbitrary compressed cache blocks without any placement restrictions and tag area overheads. This paper proposes Touch\'e, a framework that enables storing multiple arbitrary compressed cache blocks within a physical cacheline without any tag area overheads. The Touch\'e framework consists of three components. The first component, called the ``Signature'' (SIGN) engine, creates shortened signatures from the tag addresses of compressed blocks. Due to this, the SIGN engine can store multiple signatures in each tag entry. On a cache access, the physical cacheline is accessed only if there is…
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