Line Distillation: Increasing Cache Capacity by Filtering Unused Words in Cache Lines

Abstract

Caches are organized at a line-size granularity to exploit spatial locality. However, when spatial locality is low, many words in the cache line are not used. Unused words occupy cache space but do not contribute to cache hits. Filtering these words can allow the cache to store more cache lines. We show that unused words in a cache line are unlikely to be accessed in the less recent part of the LRU stack. We propose line distillation (LDIS), a technique that retains only the used words and evicts the unused words in a cache line. We also propose distill cache, a cache organization to utilize the capacity created by LDIS. Our experiments with 16 memory-intensive benchmarks show that LDIS reduces the average misses for a 1MB 8-way L2 cache by 30% and improves the average IPC by 12%