Intel Corporation

Edwin O'Yang

Mark B Rosenbluth

Sridhar Lakshmanamurthy

Suri B Medapati

Bijoy Bose

Irwin J Vaz

A scalable, two-stage rotating priority arbiter with re-circulation and bounded latency for use in multi-threaded, multi-processing devices. An apparatus implementing the two-stage arbiter includes a plurality of masters configured in a plurality of clusters, a plurality of targets, and an chassis interconnect that may be controlled to selectively connects a given master to a given target. The chassis interconnect includes multiple sets of bus lines connected between the plurality of clusters and the plurality of targets forming a cross-bar interconnect, including sets of bus lines corresponding to a command bus. A two-stage arbitration scheme is employed to arbitrate access to the command bus. The first arbitration stage is used to arbitrate between target requests issued by masters in a given cluster. The second arbitration stage is used to arbitrate between winning first-stage target requests. One embodiment of the arbitration scheme employs a rotating priority arbitration scheme at the first stage. Another embodiment employs a complementary rotating priority arbitration scheme at the second stage.

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Milpitas, CA, United States of America

Edwin O'Yang