165054 20251204150239.0 doi 10.1109/TC.2025.3575909 sideral 146455 ART-2025-146455 eng Valero, Alejandro Universidad de Zaragoza (orcid)0000-0002-0824-5833 Dual Fast-Track Cache: Organizing Ring-Shaped Racetracks to Work as L1 Caches 2025 Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) is the fastest memory technology and has been the common design choice for implementing first-level (L1) caches in the processor pipeline, where speed is a key design issue that must be fulfilled. On the contrary, this technology offers much lower density compared to other technologies like Dynamic RAM, limiting L1 cache sizes of modern processors to a few tens of KB. This paper explores the use of slower but denser Domain Wall Memory (DWM) technology for L1 caches. This technology provides slow access times since it arranges multiple bits sequentially in a magnetic racetrack. To access these bits, they need to be shifted in order to place them under a header. A 1-bit shift usually takes one processor cycle, which can significantly hurt the application performance, making this working behavior inappropriate for L1 caches. Based on the locality (temporal and spatial) principles exploited by caches, this work proposes the Dual Fast-Track Cache (Dual FTC) design, a new approach to organizing a set of racetracks to build set-associative caches. Compared to a conventional SRAM cache, Dual FTC enhances storage capacity by 5× while incurring minimal shifting overhead, thereby rendering it a practical and appealing solution for L1 cache implementations. Experimental results show that the devised cache organization is as fast as an SRAM cache for 78% and 86% of the L1 data cache hits and L1 instruction cache hits, respectively (i.e., no shift is required). Consequently, due to the larger L1 cache capacities, significant system performance gains (by 22% on average) are obtained under the same silicon area. Access copy available to the general public Unrestricted info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/AEI/PID2022-136454NB-C22 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/AEI/TED2021-130233B-C33 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN/PID2021-123627OB-C52 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess by https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.es info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion Lorente, Vicente Petit, Salvador Sahuquillo, Julio 5007 035 Universidad de Zaragoza Dpto. Informát.Ingenie.Sistms. Área Arquit.Tecnología Comput. 74, 8 (2025), 2812-2826 IEEE trans. comput. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS 0018-9340 3209334 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/165054/files/texto_completo.pdf Versión publicada 3634150 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/165054/files/texto_completo.jpg?subformat=icon icon Versión publicada oai:zaguan.unizar.es:165054 articulos driver 2025-12-04-14:40:08 ARTICLE