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A Tool to Model Caches/Memories
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CACTI is an analytical tool that takes a set of cache/memory para-
meters as input and calculates its access time, power, cycle
time, and area.
CACTI was originally developed by Dr. Jouppi and Dr. Wilton
in 1993 and since then it has undergone five major
revisions.
List of features (version 1-6.5):
===============================
The following is the list of features supported by the tool.
* Power, delay, area, and cycle time model for
direct mapped caches
set-associative caches
fully associative caches
Embedded DRAM memories
Commodity DRAM memories
* Support for modeling multi-ported uniform cache access (UCA)
and multi-banked, multi-ported non-uniform cache access (NUCA).
* Leakage power calculation that also considers the operating
temperature of the cache.
* Router power model.
* Interconnect model with different delay, power, and area
properties including low-swing wire model.
* An interface to perform trade-off analysis involving power, delay,
area, and bandwidth.
* All process specific values used by the tool are obtained
from ITRS and currently, the tool supports 90nm, 65nm, 45nm,
and 32nm technology nodes.
Version 6.5 has a new c++ code base and includes numerous bug fixes.
CACTI 5.3 and 6.0 activate an entire row of mats to read/write a single
block of data. This technique improves reliability at the cost of
power. CACTI 6.5 activates minimum number of mats just enough to retrieve
a block to minimize power.
How to use the tool?
====================
Prior versions of CACTI take input parameters such as cache
size and technology node as a set of command line arguments.
To avoid a long list of command line arguments,
CACTI 6.5 lets users specify their cache model in a more
detailed manner by using a config file (cache.cfg).
-> define the cache model using cache.cfg
-> run the "cacti" binary <./cacti -infile cache.cfg>
For complete documentation of the tool, please refer CACTI-5.3 and 6.0
technical reports and the following paper,
"Optimizing NUCA Organizations and Wiring Alternatives for
Large Caches With CACTI 6.0", that appears in MICRO 2007.
We are still improving the tool and refining the code. If you
have any comments, questions, or suggestions please write to
us.
Naveen Muralimanohar Jung Ho Ahn
naveen.muralimanohar@hp.com gajh@snu.ac.kr