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The cache memory consumes a large proportion of the energy used by a processor. In the on-chip cache, the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) accounts for 20–50% of energy consumption of the on-chip cache. To reduce energy consumption caused by TLB accesses, a virtual cache can be accessed by virtual addresses which are issued by a processor directly. However, a virtual cache may result in the synonym problem. In this paper, we propose low-cost synonym detection hardware and a synonym data coherence mechanism. These reduce the energy consumption incurred by TLB lookups, and maintain synonym data consistency in the virtual cache. The proposed synonym detection hardware efficiently reduces the number of blocks that must be looked up in a virtual cache for saving energy. In addition, the proposed synonym data coherence mechanism also reduces the number of invalidated blocks in the virtual cache to prevent the destruction of cache locality. The simulation results show that our proposed energy-aware virtual cache consumes 51%, 27%, and 20% less energy than the traditional physical cache, traditional virtual cache, and synonym lookaside buffer (SLB), respectively. In addition, our proposed design shows almost the same static energy consumption as SLB, and reduces static energy consumption by about 20% compared with the traditional physical cache and virtual cache. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The power consumed by memory systems accounts for 45% of the total power consumed by an embedded system, and the power consumed during a memory access is 10 times higher than during a cache access. Thus, increasing the cache hit rate can effectively reduce the power consumption of the memory system and improve system performance. In this study, we increased the cache hit rate and reduced the cache-access power consumption by developing a new cache architecture known as a single linked cache (SLC) that stores frequently executed instructions. SLC has the features of low power consumption and low access delay, similar to a direct mapping cache, and a high cache hit rate similar to a two way-set associative cache by adding a new link field. In addition, we developed another design known as a multiple linked caches (MLC) to further reduce the power consumption during each cache access and avoid unnecessary cache accesses when the requested data is absent from the cache. In MLC, the linked cache is split into several small linked caches that store frequently executed instructions to reduce the power consumption during each access. To avoid unnecessary cache accesses when a requested instruction is not in the linked caches, the addresses of the frequently executed blocks are recorded in the branch target buffer (BTB). By consulting the BTB, a processor can access the memory to obtain the requested instruction directly if the instruction is not in the cache. In the simulation results, our method performed better than selective compression, traditional cache, and filter cache in terms of the cache hit rate, power consumption, and execution time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]