Intel Corporation

John Beck

Frank T Hady

Mason B Cabot

Mark B Rosenbluth

A multi-core processor providing heterogeneous processor cores and a shared cache is presented.

Caching for heterogeneous processors

Heterogeneous processors sharing a common cache

A method and apparatus for adding an additional agent to a set of symmetric agents in a bus-based system is disclosed. In one embodiment, the number of symmetric agents in the system is fixed. An additional agent may monitor the symmetric arbitration of the symmetric agents, and at a given stage of the symmetric arbitration assert a priority agent bus request. The priority agent bus request may be shared with another priority agent. This may permit the additional agent to access the bus in a fair manner that behaves as though it were an additional symmetric agent in the system.

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Northboro, MA, United States of America

John Beck