Object Cache: An Energy Efficient Cache Architecture
S.S. Shekhar and Y.N. Srikant
IISc-CSA-TR-2005-13
(October 2005) Available formats: [pdf]
Filed on October 7, 2005
Updated on December 28, 2005
Object-oriented programming languages provide a rich set of features that
provide significant software engineering benefits. The increased
productivity provided by these features comes at a justifiable cost of
complexity in the runtime environment. This complexity leads to reduced
performance and increased energy consumption of the programs. The demand
for powerful battery operated mobile devices has accentuated the need for
complex, yet low energy systems. To alleviate the problem of increased
energy consumption in architectures that typically support runtime
environments for object oriented programs, an energy-efficient cache
architecture that can have a significant impact on the overall system
energy consumption is being evaluated. The proposed Object-cache
architecture consists of a data cache (reduced in size) and an additional
small cache structure that caches only the objects called the
Object-cache. A high degree of temporal locality among a large number of
short lived objects ensures good performance of such an architecture. At
the same time, the reduced active cache size, at times accompanied by
minor improvements in performance, leads to a significant improvement in
the energy behavior of programs. Using applications from SPECjvm98
benchmark and a cycle accurate simulation, the Object-cache architecture
is shown to reduce data cache energy consumption by up to 35.9% and
overall system energy consumption by up to 7%.
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[Updated at 2009-10-22T06:42Z]