• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.232-243
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• 2002

There are many methods for improving TLB (translation lookaside buffer) performance, such as increasing the number of entry in TLB, supporting large page or multiple page sizes. The best way is to support multiple page sizes, but any operating system doesn't support multiple page sizes in user mode. So, we propose the new structure of TLB supporting two pages to obtain the effect of multiple page sizes with high performance and at low cost without operating system support. we propose a new TLB structure supporting two page sizes dynamically and selectively for high performance and low cost design without any operating system support. For high performance, a promotion-TLB is designed by supporting two page sizes. Also in order to attain low power consumption, a banked-TLB is constructed by dividing one fully associative TLB space into two sub-fully associative TLBs. These two banked-TLB structures are integrated into a banked-promotion TLB as a low power and high performance TLB structure for embedded processors. According to the results of comparison and analysis, a similar performance can be achieved by using fewer TLB entries and also power consumption can be reduced by around 50% comparing with the fully associative TLB.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2010

Recently, processor performance has been improved dramatically. Unfortunately, as the process technology scales down, energy consumption in a processor increases significantly whereas the processor performance continues to improve. Moreover, peak temperature in the processor increases dramatically due to the increased power density, resulting in serious thermal problem. For this reason, performance, energy consumption and thermal problem should be considered together when designing up-to-date processors. This paper proposes three modified filter cache schemes to alleviate the thermal problem in the filter cache, which is one of the most energy-efficient design techniques in the hierarchical memory systems : Bypass Filter Cache (BFC), Duplicated Filter Cache (DFC) and Partitioned Filter Cache (PFC). BFC scheme enables the direct access to the L1 cache when the temperature on the filter cache exceeds the threshold, leading to reduced temperature on the filter cache. DFC scheme lowers temperature on the filter cache by appending an additional filter cache to the existing filter cache. The filter cache for PFC scheme is composed of two half-size filter caches to lower the temperature on the filter cache by reducing the access frequency. According to our simulations using Wattch and Hotspot, the proposed partitioned filter cache shows the lowest peak temperature on the filter cache, leading to higher reliability in the processor.