Hashed Addressed Caches for Embedded Pointer Based Codes (Research Note)

We are proposing a cache addressing scheme based on hash-ing intended to decrease the miss ratio of small size caches. The main intention is to improve the hit ratio for 'random' patterns pointer memory accesses for embedded (special purpose) system applications. We introduce a hashing scheme, denoted as bit juggling, and measure the eeect such a scheme has in the cache access miss ratio. It is shown, for the considered benchmark, that 3-bit bit juggling will reduce the miss ratio for up to 12%, for associative caches of maximum size of 8KBytes when compared to usual cache addressing schemes.