This article explores low-cost LLC power management policies for multiprogrammed
and multithreaded benchmarks. Based on our extensive experimental analysis, we can
conclude that simultaneously exploiting three key metrics, that is, utilization, hotness,
and the distribution of dirty cache lines, is necessary to design the power management
policies for an energy-efficient LLC. Powering on a fix granularity of cache slices (VHon)
can provide higher power savings, while the system that requires higher performance
would benefit from the DynOn policy that dynamically powers on a different number of
slices according to the potential hits to the powered-off portions. By migrating data from
the hot slices to other active slices, the performance can be improved by eliminating
the additional cache misses due to the smaller cache capacity. Our EECache achieves
14.1% energy savings with a less than 2% performance degradation and consumes
negligible hardware overhead