As circuit integration technology advances, the design of efficient interconnects has become critical. On-chip networks have been adopted to overcome scalability and the poor resource sharing problems of shared buses or dedicated wires. However, using a general on-chip network for a specific domain may cause underutilization of the network resources and huge network delays because the interconnects are not optimized for the domain. Addressing these two issues is challenging because in-depth

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... ledges of interconnects and the specific domain are required. Recently proposed Non-Uniform Cache Architectures (NUCAs) use wormhole-routed 2D mesh networks to improve the performance of on-chip L2 caches. We observe that network resources in NUCAs are underutilized and occupy considerable chip area (52% of cache area). Also the network delay is significantly large (63% of cache access time). Motivated by our observations, we investigate how to optimize cache operations and design the network in large scale cache systems. We propose a single-cycle router architecture that can efficiently support multicasting in on-chip caches. Next, we present Fast-LRU replacement, where cache replacement overlaps with data request delivery. Finally we propose a deadlock-free XYX routing algorithm and a new halo network topology to minimize the number of links in the network. Simulation results show that our networked cache system improves the average IPC by 38% over the mesh network design with Multicast Promotion replacement while using only 23% of the interconnection area. Specifically, Multicast Fast-LRU replacement improves the average IPC by 20% compared with Multicast Promotion replacement. A halo topology design additionally improves the average IPC by 18% over a mesh topology.