Performance based system and method for dynamic allocation of a unified multiport cache

摘要

The present invention provides a performance based system and method for dynamic allocation of a unified multiport cache. A multiport cache system is disclosed that allows multiple single-cycle look ups through a multiport tag and multiple single-cycle cache accesses from a multiport cache. Therefore, multiple processes, which could be processors, tasks, or threads can access the cache during any cycle. Moreover, the ways of the cache can be allocated to the different processes and then dynamically reallocated based on performance. Most preferably, a relational cache miss percentage is used to reallocate the ways, but other metrics may also be used.