Low Energy Partial Tag Comparison Cache Using Valid-bit Pre-decision

Set-associative caches achieve low miss rates for typical applications but result in significant energy dissipation. For low energy, we introduce a new cache design, partial tag comparison cache using valid-bit pre-decision (PTC-V cache), which can efficiently save the energy dissipation of the sense amps and bits-line parts. We used the CACTI cache model to evaluate the proposed cache architecture and the Simplescalar CPU simulator to produce the final result on SPEC95. The power simulation result show that our modified partial tag comparison cache can save 55% of instruction cache's accessing energy.