Exploiting Transmission Lines on Heterogeneous Networks-on-Chip to Improve the Adaptivity and Efficiency of Cache Coherence

Abstract

Emerging heterogeneous interconnects have shown lower latency and higher throughput, which can improve the efficiency of communication and create new opportunities for memory system designs. In this paper, transmission lines are employed as a latency-optimized network and combined with a packet-switched network to create heterogeneous interconnects improving the efficiencies of on-chip communication and cache coherence. We take advantage of this heterogeneous interconnect design, and keep cache coherence adaptively based on data locality. Different type of messages are adaptively directed through selected medium of the heterogeneous interconnects to enhance cache coherence effectiveness. Compared with a state-of-the-art coherence mechanism, the proposed technique can reduce the coherence overhead by 24%, reduce the network energy consumption by 35%, and improve the system performance by 25% on a 64-core system.