Exploiting Compressed Block Size as an Indicator of Future Reuse
The authors introduce a set of new Compression-Aware Management Policies (CAMP) for on-chip caches that employ data compression. Their management policies are based on two key ideas. First, they show that it is possible to build a more efficient management policy for compressed caches if the compressed block size is directly used in calculating the value (importance) of a block to the cache. This leads to Minimal-Value Eviction (MVE), a policy that evicts the cache blocks with the least value, based on both the size and the expected future reuse. Second, they show that, in some cases, compressed block size can be used as an efficient indicator of the future reuse of a cache block.