Discuss the pros and cons of shared vs. private L2 caches for both single-threaded, multi-threaded, and multiprogrammed workloads, and reconsider them if having on-chip L3 caches.

Both Barcelona and Nehalem are chip multiprocessors (CMPs), having multiple cores and their caches on a single chip. CMP on-chip L2 cache design has interesting trade-offs. The following table shows the miss rates and hit latencies for two benchmarks with private vs. shared L2 cache designs. Assume L1 cache misses once every 32 instructions.

Transcribed Image Text:

Benchmark A misses-per-instruction Benchmark B misses-per-instruction Private 0.30% 0.06% Shared 0.12% 0.03%