The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jun. 18, 2019
Filed:
Nov. 11, 2016
Microsoft Technology Licensing, Llc, Redmond, WA (US);
Patrick P. Lai, Fremont, CA (US);
Robert Allen Shearer, Woodinville, WA (US);
MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
A cache system is configurable to trade power consumption for cache access latency. When it is desired for a system with a cache to conserve dynamic power, the lookup of accesses (e.g., snoops) to cache tag ways is serialized to perform one (or less than all) tag way access per clock (or even slower). Thus, for an N-way set associative cache, instead of performing a lookup/comparison on the N tag ways in parallel, the lookups are performed one tag way at a time. This take N times more cycles thereby reducing the access/snoop bandwidth by a factor of N. However, the power consumption of the serialized access when compared to 'all parallel' accesses/snoops is reduced.