Relative Performance of a Multi-level Cache with Last-level Cache Replacement: An Analytical Review

Current day processors employ multi-level cache hierarchy with one or two levels of private caches and a shared last-level cache (LLC). Replacement policy at the Last Level Cache is vital due to reduction of off-chip memory latency as well as conflict for memory bandwidth. Cache replacement techniques for inclusive LLCs may not be efficient for multilevel cache as it can be shared by enormous applications with varying access behavior, running simultaneously. One application may dominate another by flooding of cache requests and evicting the useful data of the other application. This paper analyzes some of the existing replacement techniques on the LLC with their performance assessment.