Cache Operations by MRU Change

The performance of set associative caches is analyzed. The method used is to group the cache lines into regions according to their positions in the replacement stacks of a cache, and then to observe how the memory accesses of a CPU are distributed over these regions. Results from our CPU traces show that the memory accesses are heavily concentrated on the most recently used (MRU) region in the cache. The concept of MRU change is introduced; the idea is to use the event that the CPU accesses a non-MRU line to approximate the time the CPU is changing its working set. The concept is shown to be useful in many aspects of cache design and performance evaluation, such as comparison of various replacement algorithms, improvement of prefetch algorithms, and speedup of cache simulation. © 1988 IEEE