High performance cache replacement using re-reference interval prediction (RRIP)

Practical cache replacement policies attempt to emulate optimal replacement by predicting the re-reference interval of a cache block. The commonly used LRU replacement policy always predicts a nearimmediate re-reference interval on cache hits and misses. Applications that exhibit a distant re-reference interval perform badly under LRU. Such applications usually have a working-set larger than the cache or have frequent bursts of references to nontemporal data (called scans). To improve the performance of such workloads, this paper proposes cache replacement using Rereference Interval Prediction (RRIP). We propose Static RRIP (SRRIP) that is scan-resistant and Dynamic RRIP (DRRIP) that is both scan-resistant and thrash-resistant. Both RRIP policies require only 2-bits per cache block and easily integrate into existing LRU approximations found in modern processors. Our evaluations using PC games, multimedia, server and SPEC CPU2006 workloads on a single-core processor with a 2MB last-lev...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Aamer Jaleel, Kevin B. Theobald, Simon C. Steely Jr., Joel S. Emer
• Keywords: Cache, Cache Replacement, Hardware, ISCA 2010, LRU Replacement