Although the extra hardware employed by the location cache design
does not introduce extra delay on the memory reference critical
path, it does introduce extra power consumption. The extra
power consumption comes from the small location cache and the
duplicated tag arrays. We summarize the power consumption of
the control circuits as well as the original L2 cache in Table 2. The
simulated L2 cache is a 512KB 8-way set-associative cache, with
the cache line size of 128 bytes. We normalize the power consumption
for the tag access of a direct-mapped hit to one. Comparing to
the L2 cache power consumption, the location cache consumes a
small amount of power. However, as the location cache is triggered
much often than the L2 cache, its power consumption cannot be ignored. The total chip area of the proposed location cache system
(with duplicated tag and a location cache of 1024 entries) is only
1.39% larger than that of the original cache system.