Performance implications of tolerating cache faults

The authors investigate how much cache miss ratios increase when blocks are disabled. It is shown how the mean miss ratio increase can be characterized as a function of the miss ratios of related caches, an efficient approach is developed for calculating the exact distribution of miss ratio increases from all fault patterns, and this approach is applied to the ATUM traces (see A. Agarwal et al., 1986). Results reveal that the mean relative miss ratio increase from a few faults decreases with increasing cache size and is negligible (<2% per defect) unless a set is completely disabled by faults. The maximum relative increase is also acceptable (5% per fault) if no set is entirely disabled