The following questions investigate the impact of small and simple caches using CACTI, and assume a 90 nm (0.09 μm) technology.
a. Compare the access times of 32 KB caches with 64-byte blocks and a single bank. What is the relative access times of two-way and four-way set associative caches in comparison to a direct-mapped organization?
b. Compare the access times of two-way set-associative caches with 64-byte blocks and a single bank. What is the relative access times of 32 KB and 64 KB caches in comparison to a 16 KB cache?
c. Does the access time for a typical level 1 cache organization increase with size roughly as the capacity in bytes B, the square root of B, or the log of B?
d. Find the cache organization with the lowest average memory access time given the miss ratio table in Figure 5.29 and a cache access time budget of 0.90 ns. What is this organization, and does it have the lowest miss rate of all organizations for its capacity?