The Cache-Core Architecture to Enhance the Memory Performance on Multi-Core Processors

Multi-core architectures are focused on improving the processor performance. However, multi-core processors cannot achieve their peak performance when application program has a little thread level parallelism. On the other hand, it is difficult to extract thread level parallelism from application programs. Because of these factors, in this paper, we propose the cache-core. The cache-core is a mechanism where the excess core behaves like an L2 data cache by executing software managed cache program. As the cache-core supplies other core with data as an L2 cache, the number of global memory accesses can decrease. So the cache-core enhances the performance of multi-core processor. We evaluate the cache-core on Cell/B. E. processor in detail. Our evaluation results show that the cache-core can improve computational performance. Furthermore, this paper describes consideration of the cache-core for a many-core processor. We evaluate the cache-core when a lot of cores massively access the global memory. The evaluation results show effectiveness of the cache-core on a many-core processor.