GATE Overflow Test Series | Mock GATE | Test 4 | Question: 34

Question

Which one of the following is/are correct? (Mark all the appropriate choices)

• A. Compulsory misses can be reduced by increasing the total cache size.
• B. Capacity misses can be reduced by increasing the block size.
• C. Conflict misses may be reduced by increasing the value of associativity.
• D. Compulsory misses can be reduced by increasing the cache block size.

Comments

https://gatecse.in/cache-misses/

Answer 1

Compulsory Miss: Can be reduced by increasing the cache block size. It can increase if we increase the cache size.

Capacity Miss: Can be reduced by increasing the cache size.

Conflict Miss: Can be reduced by increasing the associativity. It can increase with a larger block size (which can increase the chance of conflicts).

So, correct answer: C;D.

Comments

Decreasing compulsary miss will inturn increase the capacity miss if we will increase the block size, I think.

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If we increase the block size, the memory request which might have mapped to different frames earlier can come under the same frame and hence reduce the compulsory misses.

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@sukruth.yallayi imagine the whole cache is one big chunk of block which means that after the first miss the block is fetched then new memory accesses will not be compulsory misses. This is the extreme case scenario btw. But generally we can say that increasing block size reduced compulsory misses.