The cacti program models the timing characteristics of a
data cache, given the cache capacity, block size and
associativity. It is straightforward to use; to determine
the timings for an 8 Kbyte cache with 32-byte block size and
2-way set-associativity simply type:
cacti 8192 32 2
The two relevant lines of output are:
Access time: 5.09918e-09 Cycle time: 6.22891e-09
Such a configuration would exceed the maximum cache hit time of 5.8 nS, and must therefore be excluded from the set of candidate solutions.