Chapter 5 - Practice Problems
ECE 485, Fall 2017
5.2 Caches are important to providing a high-performance memory hierarchy to processors.
Below is a list of 32-bit memory address references, given as word addresses.
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Chapter 5 - Practice Problems
ECE 485, Fall 2017
5.2 Caches are important to providing a high-performance memory hierarchy to processors.
Below is a list of 32-bit memory address references, given as word addresses.
3, 180, 43, 2, 191, 88, 190, 14, 181, 44, 186, 253
5.2.1 For each of these references, identify the binary address, the tag, and the index given a
direct-mapped cache with 16 one-word blocks. Also list if each reference is a hit or a miss,
assuming the cache is initially empty.
5.2.2 For each of these references, identify the binary address, the tag, and the index given a
direct-mapped cache with two-word blocks and a total size of 8 blocks. Also list if each reference
is a hit or a miss, assuming the cache is initially empty.
5.2.3 You are asked to optimize a cache design for the given references. There are three directmapped cache designs possible, all with a total of 8 words of data: C1 has 1-word blocks, C2 has
2-word blocks, and C3 has 4-word blocks. In terms of miss rate, which cache design is the best?
If the miss stall time is 25 cycles, and C1 has an access time of 2 cycles, C2 takes 3 cycles, and
C3 takes 5 cycles, which is the best cache design?
There are many different design parameters that are important to a cache’s overall performance.
Below are listed parameters for different direct-mapped cache designs.
Cache Data Size: 32 KiB
Cache Block Size: 2 words
Cache Access Time: 1 cycle
5.6 In this exercise, we will look at the different ways capacity affects overall performance. In
general, cache access time is proportional to capacity. Assume that main memory accesses take
70 ns and that memory accesses are 36% of all instructions. The following table shows data for
L1 caches attached to each of two processors, P1 and P2.
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