The main advantages of scratchpads (the name for purely software managed memories like the Cell SPEs had) is not only area efficiency, but power efficiency... I

The main advantages of scratchpads (the name for purely software managed memories like the Cell SPEs had) is not only area efficiency, but power efficiency... In the case of the processor I am designing utilizing scratchpads, we can have twice the size scratchpad that is using one fifth of the power compared to if we used a traditional single port L1 cache. Thankfully, we have spent most of our time and energy in developing out our toolchain in order to actually make full use of the scratchpads without having the programmer needing to manually manage their programs memory.