Leveraging Non-Volatile Storage to Achieve Versatile Cache Optimizations

The efficiency of caches plays a vital role in microprocessor. In this paper, we introduce a novel and flexible cache substrate that employs non-volatile yet versatile SRAM (NV2-SRAM) cell design, which synergistically integrates new memory devices into the standard SRAM cells. Our experiments show that it can achieve a 67 percent energy saving and 3:1x reliability improvement over the SRAM based cache, outperforming the drowsy cache design in terms of both power efficiency and reliability. Moreover, the proposed cache architecture can be used to improve the performance of prefetching schemes by 10 percent.