Benefits of Multiword Blocks

Increasing block size improves performance, to a point



Larger blocks increase benefits of spatial locality

Larger blocks = fewer blocks for a given cache size = greater likelihood a useful block is flushed when another block is brought in (conflict misses)

Memory request techniques --

Early restart

Requested word first

Pgm Wd Inst Miss Data Miss Effective Miss Ratio

GCC 1 6.1% 2.1% 5.4%

4 2.0% 1.7% 1.9%

Spice 1 1.2% 1.3% 1.2%

4 0.3% 0.6% 0.4%

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