An authoritative book for hardware and software designers. Caches are by far the simplest and most effective mechanism for improving computer performance. This innovative book exposes the characteristics of performance-optimal single and multi-level cache hierarchies by approaching the cache design process through the novel perspective of minimizing execution times. It presents useful data on the relative performance of a wide spectrum of machines and offers empirical and analytical evaluations of the underlying phenomena. This book will help computer professionals appreciate the impact of caches and enable designers to maximize performance given particular implementation constraints.

This book describes the architecture of microprocessors from simple in-order short pipeline designs to out-of-order superscalars.

This book equips readers with tools for computer architecture of high performance, low power, and high reliability memory hierarchy in computer systems based on emerging memory technologies, such as STTRAM, PCM, FBDRAM, etc. The techniques described offer advantages of high density, near-zero static power, and immunity to soft errors, which have the potential of overcoming the “memory wall.” The authors discuss memory design from various perspectives: emerging memory technologies are employed in the memory hierarchy with novel architecture modification; hybrid memory structure is introduced to leverage advantages from multiple memory technologies; an analytical model named “Moguls” is introduced to explore quantitatively the optimization design of a memory hierarchy; finally, the vulnerability of the CMPs to radiation-based soft errors is improved by replacing different levels of on-chip memory with STT-RAMs.

A key determinant of overall system performance and power dissipation is the cache hierarchy since access to off-chip memory consumes many more cycles and energy than on-chip accesses. In addition, multi-core processors are expected to place ever higher bandwidth demands on the memory system. All these issues make it important to avoid off-chip memory access by improving the efficiency of the on-chip cache. Future multi-core processors will have many large cache banks connected by a network and shared by many cores. Hence, many important problems must be solved: cache resources must be allocated across many cores, data must be placed in cache banks that are near the accessing core, and the most important data must be identified for retention. Finally, difficulties in scaling existing technologies require adapting to and exploiting new technology constraints. The book attempts a synthesis of recent cache research that has focused on innovations for multi-core processors. It is an excellent starting point for early-stage graduate students, researchers, and practitioners who wish to understand the landscape of recent cache research. The book is suitable as a reference for advanced computer architecture classes as well as for experienced researchers and VLSI engineers. Table of Contents: Basic Elements of Large Cache Design / Organizing Data in CMP Last Level Caches / Policies Impacting Cache Hit Rates / Interconnection Networks within Large Caches / Technology / Concluding Remarks

Algorithms that have to process large data sets have to take into account that the cost of memory access depends on where the data is stored. Traditional algorithm design is based on the von Neumann model where accesses to memory have uniform cost. Actual machines increasingly deviate from this model: while waiting for memory access, nowadays, microprocessors can in principle execute 1000 additions of registers; for hard disk access this factor can reach six orders of magnitude. The 16 coherent chapters in this monograph-like tutorial book introduce and survey algorithmic techniques used to achieve high performance on memory hierarchies; emphasis is placed on methods interesting from a theoretical as well as important from a practical point of view.

This synthesis lecture presents the current state-of-the-art in applying low-latency, lossless hardware compression algorithms to cache, memory, and the memory/cache link. There are many non-trivial challenges that must be addressed to make data compression work well in this context. First, since compressed data must be decompressed before it can be accessed, decompression latency ends up on the critical memory access path. This imposes a significant constraint on the choice of compression algorithms. Second, while conventional memory systems store fixed-size entities like data types, cache blocks, and memory pages, these entities will suddenly vary in size in a memory system that employs compression. Dealing with variable size entities in a memory system using compression has a significant impact on the way caches are organized and how to manage the resources in main memory. We systematically discuss solutions in the open literature to these problems. Chapter 2 provides the foundations of data compression by first introducing the fundamental concept of value locality. We then introduce a taxonomy of compression algorithms and show how previously proposed algorithms fit within that logical framework. Chapter 3 discusses the different ways that cache memory systems can employ compression, focusing on the trade-offs between latency, capacity, and complexity of alternative ways to compact compressed cache blocks. Chapter 4 discusses issues in applying data compression to main memory and Chapter 5 covers techniques for compressing data on the cache-to-memory links. This book should help a skilled memory system designer understand the fundamental challenges in applying compression to the memory hierarchy and introduce him/her to the state-of-the-art techniques in addressing them.

Is your memory hierarchy stopping your microprocessor from performing at the high level it should be? Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk shows you how to resolve this problem. The book tells you everything you need to know about the logical design and operation, physical design and operation, performance characteristics and resulting design trade-offs, and the energy consumption of modern memory hierarchies. You learn how to to tackle the challenging optimization problems that result from the side-effects that can appear at any point in the entire hierarchy.As a result you will be able to design and emulate the entire memory hierarchy. Understand all levels of the system hierarchy -Xcache, DRAM, and disk. Evaluate the system-level effects of all design choices. Model performance and energy consumption for each component in the memory hierarchy.