Improving cache performance
To improve cache performance:
- Decrease miss rate without increasing time to handle the miss
- Decrease time to handle the miss w/o increasing miss rate
A slew of techniques
- Increase capacity, associativity etc.
- Hardware assists (victim caches, write buffers)
- Prefetching (hardware and software) and lock-up free caches
- Page coloring (O.S.)
- Tiling (compiler)
- etc.