Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Advanced Micro Devices Corporation

Teik Tan

Emil Talpes

Vikas Sinha

Tarun Nakra

Gregory William Smaus

Michael David Achenbach

Ganesh Venkataramanan

According to one general aspect, an apparatus may include a multi-tiered cache system that includes at least one upper cache tier relatively closer, hierarchically, to a processor and at least one lower cache tier relatively closer, hierarchically, to a system memory. The apparatus may include a memory interconnect circuit hierarchically between the multi-tiered cache system and the system memory. The apparatus may include a prefetcher circuit coupled with a lower cache tier of the multi-tiered cache system, and configured to issue a speculative prefetch request to the memory interconnect circuit for data to be placed into the lower cache tier. The memory interconnect circuit may be configured to cancel the speculative prefetch request if the data exists in an upper cache tier of the multi-tiered cache system.

Prefetching in a lower level exclusive cache hierarchy

The present invention provides a method and apparatus for scheduling based on tags of different types. Some embodiments of the method include broadcasting a first tag to entries in a queue of a scheduler. The first tag is broadcast in response to a first instruction associated with a first entry in the queue being picked for execution. The first tag includes information identifying the first entry and information indicating a type of the first tag. Some embodiments of the method also include marking at least one second entry in the queue is ready to be picked for execution in response to at least one second tag associated with at least one second entry in the queue matching the first tag.

Hybrid tag scheduler to broadcast scheduler entry tags for picked instructions

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Teik Tan