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. 24, 1997
Filed:
Dec. 21, 1994
Wen-Hann Wang, Portland, OR (US);
John M Bauer, Portland, OR (US);
Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A cache memory with reduced request-blocking blocks requests from being accepted by the cache memory based on the types of requests the cache is already servicing. A request which hits the cache memory or a request which misses the cache memory but does not conflict with any requests already being serviced is not blocked. A request which misses the cache memory and also conflicts with a request(s) already being serviced causes the request to be blocked. In one embodiment, conflicts for write requests are determined by checking whether the cache is already retrieving a cache line from system memory for a request which maps into the same cache set as the write request. If such a request exists, then a conflict occurs. In this embodiment, conflicts for read requests are determined by checking whether the cache is already servicing an outstanding request to memory for the same address. If so, then a conflict occurs. If not, then a conflict does not occur unless the victim line for the read request is dirty and no space exists in a write-back buffer to temporarily store the victim line.