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US 2007/0168617 A1Published application
Patrol snooping for higher level cache eviction candidate identification
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsJohn Borkenhagen, Brian Vanderpool
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A computer system having patrol snoop sequencer that sequences through addresses of cache lines held in a higher level cache, making snoop reads using those addresses to a lower level cache. If a particular cache line held in the higher level cache is not held in the lower level cache, the particular cache line is identified as an eviction candidate in the higher level cache when a new cache line must be loaded into the higher level cache.
Claims18
A method for cache line replacement including the steps of:
- identifying a first cache line in a higher level cache that does not exist in a lower level cache;
- and
- evicting the first cache line from the higher level cache instead of a second cache line in the higher level cache that does exist in the lower level cache.
A computer system comprising:
- A memory controller further comprising:
- a higher level cache;
- and
- a snoop patrol sequencer;
- and
- a lower level cache coupled to the memory controller;
- wherein the snoop patrol sequencer is configured to be capable of identifying a cache line in the higher level cache that does not exist in the lower level cache.
4 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.