Trade-offs for Skewed-Associative Caches

The skewed-associative cache achieves low miss rates with limited associativity by using inter-bank dispersion, the ability to disperse blocks over many sets in one bank if they map to the same set in another bank. This paper formally defines the degree of inter-bank dispersion and argues that high inter-bank dispersion conflicts with common micro-architectural designs in which the skewed-associative cache is embedded. Various tradeoffs for the skewed-associative cache are analyzed and a skewed-associative cache organization with reduced complexity and a near-optimal cache miss rate is proposed.