Apple Inc.

Srinivasa Rangan Sridharan

Harshavardhan Kaushikkar

Christopher D Shuler

Xiaoming Wang

Sridhar Kotha

Gerard Richard Williams

Sandeep Kumar Gupta

Gaurav Garg

Per Hakan Hammarlund

Tyler J Huberty

Sagi Lahav

Rohit Natarajan

Lital Levy-Rubin

Muditha Kanchana

Eric Jason Furbish

Wolfgang H Klingauf

Vivek Venkatraman

Yu Zhang

Stephan G Meier

Kenneth Christian Dyke

Rohit Kumar Gupta

Deniz Balkan

Jurgen M Schulz

James Vash

Karthik Ramani

Anthony P DeLaurier

Winnie W Yeung

David A Gotwalt

Munetoshi Fukami

Jeff Gonion

Neeraj Parik

Samer Nassar

Luc R Semeria

Kaushik Kannan

Thomas T Zou

Yang Yang

Jeffry E Gonion

Manu Gulati

Steven John Fishwick

Brian P Lilly

Lior Zimet

Sergio Kolor

Tal Kuzi

Benjamin K Dodge

Charles E Tucker

Rong Zhang Hu

Dany Davidov

Nir Leshem

Mark Pilip

Stephen G Meier

Jeonghee Shin

Anjana Subramanian

Yu Simon Zhang

Mukul A Joshi

Thejasvi M Vijayaraj

A cache may store critical cache lines and non-critical cache lines, and may attempt to retain critical cache lines in the cache by, for example, favoring the critical cache lines in replacement data updates. Multiple levels of criticality may be available for a given cache line and cache circuitry may adjust the criticality value of in response to a criticality event. One or more upper criticality levels may be masked when selecting a victim cache line for replacement.

Criticality-informed caching policies with multiple criticality levels

A memory controller may include a dynamic arbitration scheme to dynamically vary arbitration factors of two or more traffic classes based on dynamic latency tolerance, requested and available bandwidths on an interconnect from source agents to memory controllers, and other dynamic and static factors.

Bandwidth-aware fabric traffic shaping

Techniques are disclosed relating to an I/O agent circuit. The I/O agent circuit may include one or more queues and a transaction pipeline. The I/O agent circuit may issue, to the transaction pipeline from a queue of the one or more queues, a transaction of a series of transactions enqueued in a particular order. The I/O agent circuit may generate, at the transaction pipeline, a determination to return the transaction to the queue based on a detection of one or more conditions being satisfied. Based on the determination, the I/O agent circuit may reject, at the transaction pipeline, up to a threshold number of transactions that issued from the queue after the transaction issued. The I/O agent circuit may insert the transaction at a head of the queue such that the transaction is enqueued at the queue sequentially first for the series of transactions according to the particular order.

Ensuring transactional ordering in I/O agent

A cache may store critical cache lines and non-critical cache lines, and may attempt to retain critical cache lines in the cache by, for example, favoring the critical cache lines in replacement data updates, retaining the critical cache lines with a certain probability when victim cache blocks are being selected, etc. Criticality values may be retained at various levels of the cache hierarchy. Additionally, accelerated eviction may be employed if the threads previously accessing the critical cache blocks are viewed as dead.

Mitigating retention of previously-critical cache lines

A non-transitory computer-readable medium is disclosed, the medium having instructions stored thereon that are executable by a computer system to perform operations that may include allocating a plurality of storage locations in a system memory of the computer system to a buffer. The operations may further include selecting a particular order for allocating the plurality of storage locations into a cache memory circuit. This particular order may increase a uniformity of cache miss rates in comparison to a linear order. The operations may also include caching subsets of the plurality of storage locations of the buffer using the particular order.

Allocation of a buffer located in system memory into a cache memory

Criticality-informed caching policies

An integrated circuit (IC) including a plurality of processor cores, a plurality of graphics processing units, a plurality of peripheral circuits, and a plurality of memory controllers is configured to support scaling of the system using a unified memory architecture. For example, the IC may include an interconnect fabric configured to provide communication between the one or more memory controller circuits and the processor cores, graphics processing units, and peripheral devices; and an off-chip interconnect coupled to the interconnect fabric and configured to couple the interconnect fabric to a corresponding interconnect fabric on another instance of the integrated circuit, wherein the interconnect fabric and the off-chip interconnect provide an interface that transparently connects the one or more memory controller circuits, the processor cores, graphics processing units, and peripheral devices in either a single instance of the integrated circuit or two or more instances of the integrated circuit.

Scalable system on a chip

An apparatus includes a cache controller circuit and a cache memory circuit that further includes cache memory having a plurality of cache lines. The cache controller circuit may be configured to receive a request to reallocate a portion of the cache memory circuit that is currently in use. This request may identify an address region corresponding to one or more of the cache lines. The cache controller circuit may be further configured, in response to the request, to convert the one or more cache lines to directly-addressable, random-access memory (RAM) by excluding the one or more cache lines from cache operations.

Dynamic allocation of cache memory as RAM

Techniques are disclosed relating to an I/O agent circuit of a computer system. The I/O agent circuit may receive, from a peripheral component, a set of transaction requests to perform a set of read transactions that are directed to one or more of a plurality of cache lines. The I/O agent circuit may issue, to a first memory controller circuit configured to manage access to a first one of the plurality of cache lines, a request for exclusive read ownership of the first cache line such that data of the first cache line is not cached outside of the memory and the I/O agent circuit in a valid state. The I/O agent circuit may receive exclusive read ownership of the first cache line, including receiving the data of the first cache line. The I/O agent circuit may then perform the set of read transactions with respect to the data.

I/O agent

In one embodiment, a cache coherent system includes one or more agents (e.g., coherent agents) that may cache data used by the system. The system may include a point of coherency in a memory controller in the system, and thus the agents may transmit read requests to the memory controller to coherently read data. The point of coherency may determine if the data is cached in another agent, and may transmit a copy back request to the other agent if the other agent has modified the data. The system may include an interconnect between the agents and the memory controller. At a point on the interconnect at which traffic from the agents converges, a copy back response may be converted to a fill for the requesting agent.

Inter cluster snoop latency reduction

A system and method for efficiently allocating resources of destinations to sources conveying requests to the destinations. In various embodiments, a computing system includes multiple sources that generate requests and multiple destinations that service the requests. One or more transaction tables store requests received from the multiple sources. Arbitration logic selects requests and stores them in a processing table. When the logic selects a given request from the processing table, and determines resources for the corresponding destination is unavailable, the logic removes the given request from the processing table and allocates the request in a retry handling queue. When the retry handling queue has no data storage for the request, logic updates a transaction table entry and maintains a count of such occurrences. When the count exceeds a threshold, the logic stalls requests for that source. Requests in the retry handling queue have priority over requests in the transaction tables.

Resource access management

Systems, apparatuses, and methods for performing coherence processing and memory cache processing in parallel are disclosed. A system includes a communication fabric and a plurality of dual-processing pipelines. Each dual-processing pipeline includes a coherence processing pipeline and a memory cache processing pipeline. The communication fabric forwards a transaction to a given dual-processing pipeline, with the communication fabric selecting the given dual-processing pipeline, from the plurality of dual-processing pipelines, based on a hash of the address of the transaction. The given dual-processing pipeline performs a duplicate tag lookup in parallel with a memory cache tag lookup for the transaction. By performing the duplicate tag lookup and the memory cache tag lookup in a parallel fashion rather than in a serial fashion, latency and power consumption are reduced while performance is enhanced.

Parallel coherence and memory cache processing pipelines

In one embodiment, a cache coherent system includes one or more agents (e.g. coherent agents) that may cache data used by the system. The system may include a point of coherency in a memory controller in the system, and thus the agents may transmit read requests to the memory controller to coherently read data. The point of coherency may determine if the data is cached in another agent, and may transmit a copy back request to the other agent if the other agent has modified the data. The system may include an interconnect between the agents and the memory controller. At a point on the interconnect at which traffic from the agents converges, a copy back response may be converted to a fill for the requesting agent.

Systems, apparatuses, and methods for efficiently allocating data in a cache are described. In various embodiments, a processor decodes an indication in a software application identifying a temporal data set. The data set is flagged with a data set identifier (DSID) indicating temporal data to drop after consumption. When the data set is allocated in a cache, the data set is stored with a non-replaceable attribute to prevent a cache replacement policy from evicting the data set before it is dropped. A drop command with an indication of the DSID of the data set is later issued after the data set is read (consumed). A copy of the data set is not written back to the lower-level memory although the data set is removed from the cache. An interrupt is generated to notify firmware or other software of the completion of the drop command.

Cache drop feature to increase memory bandwidth and save power

Systems, apparatuses, and methods for implementing a distributed global ordering point are disclosed. A system includes at least a communication fabric, sequencing logic, and a plurality of coherence point pipelines. Each coherence point pipeline receives transactions from the communication fabric and then performs coherence operations and a memory cache lookup for the received transactions. The global ordering point of the system is distributed across the outputs of the separate coherence point pipelines. Device-ordered transactions travelling upstream toward memory are assigned sequence numbers by the sequencing logic. The transactions are speculatively issued from the communication fabric to the coherence point pipelines. Speculatively issuing the transactions to the coherence point pipelines may cause the transactions to pass through the distributed global ordering point out of order. Control logic on the downstream path reorders the transactions based on the assigned sequence numbers.

Systems and methods for providing distributed global ordering

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Srinivasa Rangan Sridharan