Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM) is a
promising cache candidate studied frequently in recent years.
Compared to the traditional SRAM, The STT-RAM is more
promising for future on-chip caches due to STT-RAM’s long
endurance, low leakage, high density and high access speed.
Nevertheless, the major challenges of using STT-RAM as L1
cache are its write energy and write latency. It is feasible to use
STT-RAM as L1 cache by reducing data retention time. We
find that most data in L1 cache has a life time shorter than
STT-RAM data retention time. A refresh scheme that will
degrades system performance, and bring more energy
consumption is needed to assure data correctness. In this
paper, we proposed a counter-controlled scheme to avoid STTRAM L1 cache data block refreshing. We propose a dead data
processing strategy that deals with data block when it exceeds
its retention time. Our simulation results show that STT-RAM
L1 cache coupled with our counter-controlled scheme can save
up to 60% energy consumption, 44% energy consumption on
average compared to SRAM L1 cache, achieve slightly
performance improvement on average compared to baseline