Performance and cache access time of SRAM-eDRAM hybrid caches considering wire delay

Abstract

Most modern microprocessors have multi-level on-chip caches with multi-megabyte shared last-level cache (LLC). By using multi-level cache hierarchy, the whole size of on-chip caches becomes larger. The increased cache size causes the leakage power and area of the on-chip caches to increase. Recently, to reduce the leakage power and area of the SRAM based cache, the SRAM-eDRAM hybrid cache was proposed. For SRAM-eDRAM hybrid caches, however, there has not been any study to analyze the effects of the reduced area on wire delay, cache access time, and performance. By replacing half (or three fourth) of SRAM cells by small eDRAM cells for the SRAM-eDRAM hybrid caches, wire length is shortened, which eventually results in the reduction of wire delay and cache access time. In this paper, we evaluate the SRAM-eDRAM hybrid caches in terms of the energy, area, wire delay, access time, and performance. We show that the SRAM-eDRAM hybrid cache reduces the energy consumption, area, wire delay, and SRAM array access time by up to 53.9%, 49.9%, 50.4%, and 38.7%, respectively, compared to the SRAM based cache.