Decoupled sectored caches: conciliating low tag implementation cost and low miss ratio

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Abstract
Sectored caches have been used for many years in order to reconcile low tag array size and small or medium block size. In a sectored cache, a single address tag is associated with a sector consisting on several cache lines, while validity, dirty and coherency tags are associated with each of the inner cache lines. Usually in a cache, a cache line location is statically linked to one and only one address tag word location. In the decoupled sectored cache introduced in the paper, this monolithic association is broken; the address tag location associated with a cache line location is dynamically chosen at fetch time among several possible locations. The tag volume on a decoupled sectored cache is in the same range as the tag volume in a traditional sectored cache; but the hit ratio on a decoupled sectored cache is very close to the hit ratio on a non-sectored cache. A decoupled sectored cache will allow the same level of performance as a non-sectored cache, but at a significantly lower hardware cost.

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