TY - GEN
T1 - On the reliability of drowsy instruction caches
AU - Shin, Soong Hyun
AU - Chung, Sung Woo
AU - Jhon, Chu Shik
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - As technology scales down, the leakage energy accounts for more portion of total energy in a cache. Applying the Dynamic Voltage Scaling(DVS) to a cache, which is called a drowsy cache, is known as one of the most efficient techniques for reducing leakage energy in a cache. However, it increases the Soft Error Rate(SER) and many researchers began to doubt the reliability of a drowsy cache. In this paper, we show that the instruction cache(I-cache) can adopt the DVS without reliability problems for several reasons. First, an I-cache always stores read-only data, rarely incurring unrecoverable errors. In the I-cache, the soft error can be recovered by re-fetching from the lower level memory. Second, the effect of soft errors on performance is negligible, because the SEE is extremely low. Additional, considerable percentage of soft errors do not harm the performance. In this paper, the evaluation results show that the drowsy I-cache rarely increases unrecoverable errors and negligibly degrades the performance.
AB - As technology scales down, the leakage energy accounts for more portion of total energy in a cache. Applying the Dynamic Voltage Scaling(DVS) to a cache, which is called a drowsy cache, is known as one of the most efficient techniques for reducing leakage energy in a cache. However, it increases the Soft Error Rate(SER) and many researchers began to doubt the reliability of a drowsy cache. In this paper, we show that the instruction cache(I-cache) can adopt the DVS without reliability problems for several reasons. First, an I-cache always stores read-only data, rarely incurring unrecoverable errors. In the I-cache, the soft error can be recovered by re-fetching from the lower level memory. Second, the effect of soft errors on performance is negligible, because the SEE is extremely low. Additional, considerable percentage of soft errors do not harm the performance. In this paper, the evaluation results show that the drowsy I-cache rarely increases unrecoverable errors and negligibly degrades the performance.
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U2 - 10.1007/11859802_42
DO - 10.1007/11859802_42
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33845215138
SN - 3540400567
SN - 9783540400561
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 445
EP - 451
BT - Advances in Computer Systems Architecture - 11th Asia-Pacific Conference, ACSAC 2006, Proceedings
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 11th Asia-Pacific Conference on Advances in Computer Systems Architecture, ACSAC 2006
Y2 - 6 September 2006 through 8 September 2006
ER -