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:
Aug. 04, 2026
Filed:
Jan. 10, 2025
Arm Limited, Cambridge, GB;
Matthew James Horsnell, Cambridge, GB;
Thomas Philip Speier, Wake Forest, NC (US);
Salil Ramchandra Akerkar, Austin, TX (US);
Richard Roy Grisenthwaite, Cambridge, GB;
Arm Limited, Cambridge, GB;
Abstract
An apparatus comprises instruction decoding circuitry configured to decode instructions; and processing circuitry configured to perform data processing in response to the instructions decoded by the instruction decoding circuitry. Cache control circuitry is configured to set, in response to the instruction decoding circuitry decoding a mark-live instruction specifying mark-live target address information, discard-eligibility metadata associated with one or more target cache lines selected based on the mark-live target address information, to identify the one or more target cache lines as being eligible for being treated as a discardable cache line which is allowed to be discarded without data writeback even if the discardable cache line is dirty. In response to a mark-dead event associated with a given cache line, the cache control circuitry determines depending on the discard-eligibility metadata for the given cache line whether the given cache line is eligible for becoming a discardable cache line.