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             A Tool to Model Caches/Memories
-----------------------------------------------------------

CACTI is an analytical tool that takes a set of cache/memory para-
meters as input and calculates its access time, power, cycle 
time, and area.
CACTI was originally developed by Dr. Jouppi and Dr. Wilton
in 1993 and since then it has undergone five major 
revisions.

List of features (version 1-6.5):
===============================
The following is the list of features supported by the tool. 

* Power, delay, area, and cycle time model for 
                  direct mapped caches
                  set-associative caches
                  fully associative caches
                  Embedded DRAM memories
                  Commodity DRAM memories
                  
* Support for modeling multi-ported uniform cache access (UCA)
  and multi-banked, multi-ported non-uniform cache access (NUCA).

* Leakage power calculation that also considers the operating
  temperature of the cache.
  
* Router power model.

* Interconnect model with different delay, power, and area 
  properties including low-swing wire model.

* An interface to perform trade-off analysis involving power, delay,
  area, and bandwidth.

* All process specific values used by the tool are obtained
  from ITRS and currently, the tool supports 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 
  and 32nm technology nodes.

Version 6.5 has a new c++ code base and includes numerous bug fixes.
CACTI 5.3 and 6.0 activate an entire row of mats to read/write a single
block of data. This technique improves reliability at the cost of  
power. CACTI 6.5 activates minimum number of mats just enough to retrieve 
a block to minimize power.

How to use the tool?
====================
Prior versions of CACTI take input parameters such as cache
size and technology node as a set of command line arguments. 
To avoid a long list of command line arguments, 
CACTI 6.5 lets users specify their cache model in a more 
detailed manner by using a config file (cache.cfg).

-> define the cache model using cache.cfg
-> run the "cacti" binary <./cacti -infile cache.cfg>

For complete documentation of the tool, please refer CACTI-5.3 and 6.0
technical reports and the following paper,
"Optimizing NUCA Organizations and Wiring Alternatives for 
Large Caches With CACTI 6.0", that appears in MICRO 2007.

We are still improving the tool and refining the code. If you
have any comments, questions, or suggestions please write to
us.

Naveen Muralimanohar             Jung Ho Ahn
naveen.muralimanohar@hp.com      gajh@snu.ac.kr