HyGain: high performance, energy-efficient hybrid gain cell based cache hierarchy

In this paper, we propose a 'full-stack' solution to designing high capacity and low latency on-chip cache hierarchies by starting at the circuit level of the hardware design stack. First, we propose a novel Gain Cell (GC) design using FDSOI. The GC has several desirable characteristics, including ~50% higher storage density and ~50% lower dynamic energy as compared to the traditional 6T SRAM, even after accounting for peripheral circuit overheads. We also exploit back-gate bias to increase retention time to 1.12 ms (~60x of eDRAM) which, combined with optimizations like staggered refresh, makes it an ideal candidate to architect all levels of on-chip caches. We show that compared to 6T SRAM, for a given area budget, GC based caches, on average, provide 29% and 36% increase in IPC for single- and multi-programmed workloads, respectively on contemporary workloads including SPEC CPU2017. We also observe dynamic energy savings of 42% and 34% for single- and multi-programmed workloads, respectively.We utilize the inherent properties of the proposed GC, including decoupled read and write bitlines to devise optimizations to save precharge energy and architect GC caches with better energy and performance characteristics. Finally, in a quest to utilize the best of all worlds, we combine GC with STT-RAM to create hybrid hierarchies. We show that a hybrid hierarchy with GC caches at L1 and L2, and an LLC split between GC and STT-RAM, with asymmetric write optimization enabled, is able to provide a 54% benefit in energy-delay product (EDP) as compared to an all-SRAM design, and 13% as compared to an all-GC cache hierarchy, averaged across multi-programmed workloads.