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:
Mar. 27, 2001
Filed:
Mar. 02, 1998
Marvin D. Nelson, Boise, ID (US);
Randy J. Matthews, Boise, ID (US);
Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
It has been determined that considerable data which is written to stacks is of the type that does not require long term retention (i.e., it is only required to be valid for the duration of a procedure or function which created it). Accordingly, when a stack is employed to handle such data (and other similar data), invalidation and writes to main memory that ordinarily accompany accesses of such data (when the stack is held in a cache memory) can be avoided. The invention therefore improves memory performance by providing an overlay memory, to which is assigned a set of main memory addresses that are utilized for stack operations. When data is either read or written from/to the overlay memory, there is no further communication “downstream” to either a cache memory or main memory. In other words, the overlay memory is used for short term storage and accesses to the overlay memory are invisible to other memory elements of the system. There is thus no need to invalidate any data and nor to write such data to main memory. As a result, substantially improved memory operations result.