Freescale Semiconductor,inc.

Shourjo Banerjee

Sourav Roy

Vikas Ahuja

A processor includes a processing unit, a memory, a data cache, an One Block Look-ahead (OBL) prefetch engine, a Stride-Allocate on Miss (AoM) prefetch engine and a prefetch back-off module. The prefetch back-off module assigns and sets a status bits to a prefetched cache line and resets the status bit when the cache line is used by the processing unit. The back-off module also decrements a count value when at least two cache lines are used consecutively by the processing unit, increments the count value when at least two unused cache lines are evicted consecutively from the data cache, and disables cache line prefetching when the count value is greater than zero. The stride-AoM prefetch engine includes a reference pattern table (RPT) that stores details of only those instructions that have undergone a cache miss.

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Gurgaon, India

Shourjo Banerjee