Exact and fast L1 cache simulation for embedded systems

In recent years, the gap between the cycle time of processors and memory access time has been increasing. One of the solutions to solve this problem is to use a cache. But just using a large cache may not reduce the total memory access time. We can have an optimal cache configuration which minimizes overall memory access time by varying the three cache parameters: a cache set size, a line size, and an associativity. In this paper, we propose two exact cache simulation algorithms: CRCB1 and CRCB2, based on Cache Inclusion Property. They realize exact cache simulation but increase simulation speed dramatically. By using our approach, the number of cache hit/miss judgments required for simulating all the cache configurations is reduced to 31.4%-93.6% compared to conventional approaches. As a result, our proposed approach totally runs an average of 1.8 times faster and a maximum of 3.3 times faster compared to the fastest approach proposed so far. Our proposed exact cache simulation approach achieves the world fastest L1 cache simulation.