A Survey of Novel Cache Hierarchy Designs for High Workloads

TL;DR

This survey reviews innovative cache hierarchy designs aimed at improving performance for high workload systems, comparing methods like eliminating L2, enlarging it, and using optical caches.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of three novel cache hierarchy approaches, highlighting optical caches as the most effective solution.

Findings

Optical caches outperform other methods in performance gains.

Eliminating L2 cache reduces latency but has trade-offs.

Increasing L2 size offers moderate improvements.

Abstract

Traditional on-die, three-level cache hierarchy design is very commonly used but is also prone to latency, especially at the Level 2 (L2) cache. We discuss three distinct ways of improving this design in order to have better performance. Performance is especially important for systems with high workloads. The first method proposes to eliminate L2 altogether while proposing a new prefetching technique, the second method suggests increasing the size of L2, while the last method advocates the implementation of optical caches. After carefully contemplating the results in performance gains and the advantages and disadvantages of each method, we found the last method to be the best of the three.