In the first part of the work, we introduce a novel cache architecture intended for embedded microprocessor platforms. The cache has three software-configurable parameters that can be tuned to particular applications. First, the cache's associativity can be configured to be direct-mapped, two-way, or four-way set associative, using a novel technique we call way concatenation. Second, the cache's total size can be configured by shutting down ways. Finally, the cache's line size can be configured to have 16, 32, or 64 bytes. A study of 23 programs drawn from Powerstone, MediaBench and Spec2000 benchmark suites shows that the configurable cache tuned to each program saved energy for every program compared to a conventional four-way set-associative cache as well as compared to a conventional direct mapped cache, with an average savings of energy related to memory access of over 40%.; In the second part of the work, we propose to incorporate an on chip cache tuner to automatically, dynamically and transparently determine the lowest energy dissipation cache parameters for a particular application. Tuning the configurable cache to a program is still however a cumbersome task left for designers, assisted in part by recent computer-aided design (CAD) tuning aids. We propose to move that CAD on-chip, which can greatly increase the acceptance of tunable caches. We introduce on-chip hardware implementing an efficient cache tuning heuristic that can automatically, transparently, and dynamically tune the cache to an executing program. Our heuristic seeks not only to reduce the number of configurations that must be examined, but also traverses the search space in a way that minimizes costly cache flushes.
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