The present invention relates to computer systems; more particularly, the present invention relates to central processing unit (CPU) caches.
Currently, various methods are employed to compress the content of computer system main memories such as Random Access Memory (RAM). These methods decrease the amount of physical memory space needed to provide the same performance. For instance, if a memory is compressed using a 2:1 ratio, the memory may store twice the amount of data at the same cost, or the same amount of data at half the cost.
One such method is Memory Expansion Technology (MXT), developed by International Business Machines (IBM) of Armonk, N.Y. MXT addresses system memory costs with a memory system architecture that doubles the effective capacity of the installed main memory. Logic-intensive compressor and decompressor hardware engines provide the means to simultaneously compress and decompress data as it is moved between the shared cache and the main memory. The compressor encodes data blocks into as compact a result as the algorithm permits.
However, there is currently no method for compressing data that is stored in a cache. Having the capability to compress cache data would result in similar advantages as main memory compression (e.g., decreasing the amount of cache space needed to provide the same performance).
The present invention will be understood more fully from the detailed description given below and from the accompanying drawings of various embodiments of the invention. The drawings, however, should not be taken to limit the invention to the specific embodiments, but are for explanation and understanding only.
A mechanism for compressing data in a cache is described. In the following description, numerous details are set forth. It will be apparent, however, to one skilled in the art, that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known structures and devices are shown in block diagram form, rather than in detail, in order to avoid obscuring the present invention.
Reference in the specification to “one embodiment” or “an embodiment” means that a particular feature, structure, or characteristic described in connection with the embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the invention. The appearances of the phrase “in one embodiment” in various places in the specification are not necessarily all referring to the same embodiment.
A chipset 107 is also coupled to bus 105. Chipset 107 includes a memory control hub (MCH) 110. MCH 110 may include a memory controller 112 that is coupled to a main system memory 115. Main system memory 115 stores data and sequences of instructions and code represented by data signals that may be executed by CPU 102 or any other device included in system 100.
In one embodiment, main system memory 115 includes dynamic random access memory (DRAM); however, main system memory 115 may be implemented using other memory types. Additional devices may also be coupled to bus 105, such as multiple CPUs and/or multiple system memories.
In one embodiment, MCH 110 is coupled to an input/output control hub (ICH) 140 via a hub interface. ICH 140 provides an interface to input/output (I/O) devices within computer system 100. For instance, ICH 140 may be coupled to a Peripheral Component Interconnect bus adhering to a Specification Revision 2.1 bus developed by the PCI Special Interest Group of Portland, Oreg.
Compressed Cache
According to one embodiment, a cache memory 103 resides within processor 102 and stores data signals that are also stored in memory 115. Cache 103 speeds up memory accesses by processor 103 by taking advantage of its locality of access. In another embodiment, cache 103 resides external to processor 103.
According to a further embodiment, cache 103 includes compressed cache lines to enable the storage of additional data within the same amount of area.
A tag is associated with each line of a set. Moreover, a compression bit is associated with each tag. The compression bits indicate whether a respective cache line holds compressed data. When a compression bit is set, the physical memory of the cache line holds two compressed companion lines. Companion lines are two lines with addresses that differ only in the companion bit (e.g., two consecutive memory lines aligned at line alignment).
In one embodiment, the companion bit is selected so that companion lines are adjacent lines. However, any bit can be selected to be the companion bit. In other embodiments, it may be possible to encode the compression indication with other bits that encode cache line state, such as the MESI state bits, thus eliminating this space overhead altogether.
When the compression bit is not set, the physical memory of the cache line holds one line uncompressed. Shaded compression bits in
In one embodiment, each cache line holds 64 bytes of data when not compressed. Thus, each cache line holds 128 bytes of data when compressed. The effect of the described compression scheme is that each cache tag maps to a variable-length logical cache line. As a result, cache 103 may store twice the amount of data without having to increase in physical size.
Referring back to
In one embodiment, the window of address bits that are used for set selection is shifted to the left by one so that the companion bit lies between the set selection and byte offset bits. In this way, companion lines map to the same cache set since the companion bit and set selection bits do not overlap. The companion bit, which now is no longer part of the set selection bits, becomes part of the tag, though the actual tag size does not increase. In a traditional uncompressed cache, the companion bit is a part of the address and is used in set selection to determine whether an address hashes to an odd or even cache set.
Particularly, the compression bit specifies how to deal with the companion bit. If the compression bit indicates a line is compressed, the companion bit is treated as a part of the offset because the line is a compressed pair. If the compression bit indicates no compression, the companion bit is considered as a part of the tag array and ignored as a part of the offset.
The companion bit of the address is selectively ignored depending on whether the compression bit is set. As discussed above, if the compression bit is set, the companion bit of the address is ignored during tag match because the cache line contains both companions. If the compression bit is not set, the companion bit of the address is compared with the companion bit of the tag.
The “Product of XNOR” organization of the equality operator, therefore, uses the OR gate to selectively ignore the companion bit. In one embodiment, because the tag's companion bit is ignored when the compression bit is set (e.g., it is a “don't care”), the tag's companion bit can be used for other uses. For example, when a line is compressed, this bit may be used as a compression format bit to select between two different compression algorithms. In another example, the companion bit can be used to encode the ordering of companion lines in the compressed line.
In other embodiments, each cache line is partitioned into two sectors that are stored in the same physical cache line only if the sectors can be compressed together. In the tag entry, the companion and compression bits become sector presence indications, as illustrated in
Accordingly, a “01” indicates a lower sector (not compressed), “10” indicates an upper sector (not compressed), and a “11” indicates both sectors (2:1 compression). Also, in this arrangement the physical cache line size is the same as the logical sector size. When uncompressed, each sector of a line is stored in a different physical line within the same set (e.g., different ways of the same set).
When compressible by at least 2:1, the two sectors of each line are stored in a single physical cache line (e.g., in one way). It is important to note that this differs from traditional sectored cache designs in that different logical sectors of a given logical line may be stored simultaneously in different ways when uncompressed.
In one embodiment, a free encoding (“00”) is used to indicate an invalid entry, potentially reducing the tag bit cost if combined with other bits that encode the MESI state. Because this is simply an alternative encoding, the sector presence bits require slightly difference logic to detect tag match.
Referring back to
In one embodiment, the range of the offset depends on whether the line is compressed. If the line is compressed, the companion bit of the address is used as the high order bit of the offset. If the line is not compressed, decompressor 1110 is bypassed and the companion bit of the address is not used for the offset. The selected line is held in a buffer whose size is twice the physical line size to accommodate compressed data.
Alternative embodiments may choose to use the companion bit to select which half of the decompressed word to store in a buffer whose length is the same as the physical line size. However, buffering the entire line is convenient for modifying and recompressing data after writes to the cache.
Referring back to
Compression logic 630 may also be used to determine when a line is to be compressed. According to one embodiment, opportunistic compression is used to determine when a line is to be compressed. In opportunistic compression, when a cache miss occurs the demanded cache line is fetched from memory 115 and cache 103 attempts to compress both companions into one line if its companion line is resident in the cache. If the companion line is not resident in cache 103 or if the two companions are not compressible by 2:1, then cache 103 uses its standard replacement algorithm to make space for the fetched line.
Otherwise, cache 103 reuses the resident companion's cache line to store the newly compressed pair of companions thus avoiding a replacement. Note, that it is easy to modify the tag match operator to check whether the companion line is resident without doing a second cache access. For example, if all of the address tag bits except for the companion bit match, then the companion line is resident.
In another embodiment, a prefetch mechanism is used to determine if lines are to be compressed. In the prefetch compression mechanism the opportunistic approach is refined by adding prefetching. If the companion of the demand-fetched line is not resident, the cache prefetches the companion and attempts to compress both companions into one line.
If the two companion lines are not compressible by 2:1, cache 103 has the choice of either discarding the prefetched line (thus wasting bus bandwidth) or storing the uncompressed prefetched line in the cache (thus potentially resulting in a total of two lines to be replaced in the set). In one embodiment, the hardware can adaptively switch between these policies based on how much spatial locality and latency tolerance the program exhibits.
In another embodiment, a victim compression mechanism is used to determine if lines are to be compressed. For victim compression, there is an attempt to compress a line that is about to be evicted (e.g., a victim). If a victim is not already compressed and its companion is resident, cache 103 gives the victim a chance to remain resident in the cache by attempting to compress it with its companion. If the victim is already compressed, its companion is not resident, or the victim and its companion are not compressible by 2:1, the victim is then evicted. Otherwise, cache 103 reuses the resident companion's cache line to store the compressed pair of companions, thus avoiding the eviction.
As data is written, the compressibility of a line may change. A write to a compressed pair of companions may cause the pair to be no longer compressible. Three approaches may be taken if a compressed cache line becomes uncompressible. The first approach is to simply evict another line to make room for the extra line resulting from the expansion. This may cause two companion lines to be evicted if all lines in the set are compressed.
The second approach is to evict the companion of the line that was written. The third approach is to evict the line that was written. The choice of which of these approaches to take depends partly on the interaction between the compressed cache 103 and the next cache closest to the processor (e.g., if the L3 is a compressed cache then it depends on the interaction between L3 and L2).
Assuming that the compressed cache is an inclusive L3 cache and that L2 is a write-back cache, the first two approaches include an invalidation of the evicted line in the L2 cache to maintain multi-level inclusion, which has the risk of evicting a recently accessed cache line in L2 or L1. The third approach does not require L2 invalidation and does not have the risk of evicting a recently accessed cache line from L2 because the line that is being written is being evicted from L2.
The above-described mechanism allows any two cache lines that map to the same set and that differ only in their companion bit to be compressed together into one cache line. In one embodiment, the mechanism modifies the set mapping function and selects the companion bit such that it allows adjacent memory lines to be compressed together, which takes advantage of spatial locality.
Hint Insertion Within Compressed Data
The above-described cache compression mechanism is an effective technique for reducing the spatio-temporal resource requirements. Typically, all blocks within the cache are compressible by some uniform integral factor (e.g., 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 factors), resulting in a fixed sized unit of allocation in the cache. For example, fixed-sized lines in cache obviously make allocation of cache space significantly easier.
However, compression algorithms almost never result in a consistent and useful compression ratio across all blocks of data. In fact, some threshold(s) of compressibility are chosen for a particular implementation, which typically results in limiting compressibility to a few integral factors when juxtaposed with the structure of a cache design. For example, a given compression algorithm may yield, for a set of 128-byte blocks, a wide range of compression ratios. Thus, blocks may be compressed into 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., bytes up to 128 bytes (uncompressible). In other embodiments, blocks may also be compressed into non-byte aligned bit quantities (for example, 13 bits).
However, a cache is typically some multiple of 8 bytes wide, and may be further optimized for 64-byte and 128-byte transfers. Therefore, compression should be limited to 2 to 1 compression (or by 50%), or not be compressed at all, so that all transactions fit in these optimized sizes. This forced alignment to fixed boundaries creates a certain amount of fragmentation or wasted bytes in the transactions.
For example,
According to one embodiment, hints and other information is stored in the non-useful space provided upon compression (e.g., bytes in the cache that cannot be used to store cache data). For example, several bytes of this space may be used to store next-line fetched information for the particular cache line (e.g., either an absolute address or an offset (limiting the number of bytes required)). Although the hint insertion described has been described with respect to compressed cache lines, one of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that the hint storage may be used for other applications, such as compressed memory and compressed data transfer via a bus.
In one embodiment, cache controller 104 (
In another embodiment, hints include content-based prefetch hints indicating which offsets in the line are likely to be used for addressing. The offset is used to keep track of which value in the cache line that ends up being used for the next pre-fetched address.
In another embodiment, encoded hints include content-based prefetch hints indicating which offsets in the line are likely to be used for addressing. The offset is used to keep track of which value in the cache line that ends up being used the next pre-fetched address.
In yet another embodiment, the hint includes cache liveness history or counts for precise replacement strategies. Therefore, whenever a cache is full and a new line is received, the hint may be used to decide which line to discard from the cache. For example, the hint may include the number of cycles the line was used during its last cache residence. This allows the cache to overrule its default algorithm (e.g., Least Recently Used) and evict the line when it has resided in the cache for that number of cycles. As a result, the cache may discard the line prior to receiving a new line so that the cache line may be turned off, thus conserving power.
In other embodiments, the hint includes next line touched/offset hints for pre-decompression to hide compression latency out of either memory or cache. This hint enables the prediction of a line in the cache that will be touched next and proactively decompress the line. Thus, latency associated with decompressing the line will be precluded since the line will already be decompressed.
In one embodiment, hints injected into a cache line may be fixed width, or variable width.
In one embodiment, the hint decoding occurs upon the decoding of the line itself. For a compressed cache, the decoding occurs at hint logic 640 (
For a compressed bus transaction, the decoding and encoding occur at a memory controller, and for a compressed memory transaction, the decoding and encoding may occur at either end of a memory bus.
Whereas many alterations and modifications of the present invention will no doubt become apparent to a person of ordinary skill in the art after having read the foregoing description, it is to be understood that any particular embodiment shown and described by way of illustration is in no way intended to be considered limiting. Therefore, references to details of various embodiments are not intended to limit the scope of the claims which in themselves recite only those features regarded as the invention.
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