Signature based hit-predicting cache

Abstract

An apparatus may comprise a cache file having a plurality of cache lines and a hit predictor. The hit predictor may contain a table of counter values indexed with signatures that are associated with the plurality of cache lines. The apparatus may fill cache lines into the cache file with either low or high priority. Low priority lines may be chosen to be replaced by a replacement algorithm before high priority lines. In this way, the cache naturally may contain more high priority lines than low priority ones. This priority filling process may improve the performance of most replacement schemes including the best known schemes which are already doing better than LRU.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.