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US 6,675,280 B2Granted
Method and apparatus for identifying candidate virtual addresses in a content-aware prefetcher
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsRobert N. Cooksey, Stephan J. Jourdan
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method and apparatus for identifying virtual addresses in a cache line. To differentiate candidate virtual addresses from data values and random bit patterns, the upper bits of an address-sized word in the cache line are compared with the upper bits of the cache line's effective address. If the upper bits of the address-sized word match the upper bits of the effective address, the address-sized word is identified as a candidate virtual address.
Claims41
A method comprising:
- receiving a cache line, the cache line including data requested by a processing unit:
- retrieving an effective address from the cache line;
- reading an address-sized word from the cache line, the cache line including a number of address-sized words;
- comparing an upper N bits of the address-sized word with an upper N bits of the effective address of the cache line;
- and
- if the upper N bits of the address-sized word match the upper N bits of the effective address, identifying the address-sized word as a candidate virtual address and generating a prefetch request for the candidate virtual address.
3 more elements
A device comprising:
- a cache memory, the cache memory to receive fill content requested by a processing unit, the fill content including a cache line;
- a content prefetcher coupled with the cache memory, the content prefetcher to
- receive a copy of the cache line,
- retrieve an effective address from the cache line,
- read an address-sized word from the cache line, the cache line including a number of address-sized words,
- compare an upper N bits of the address-sized word with an upper N bits of the effective address of the cache line, and
- if the upper N bits of the address-sized word match the upper N bits of the effective address, identify the address-sized word as a candidate virtual address and generate a prefetch request for the candidate virtual address.
4 more elements
An article of manufacture comprising:
- a machine accessible medium providing content that, when accessed by a machine, causes the machine to
- receive a cache line, the cache line including data requested by a processing unit;
- retrieve an effective address from the cache line;
- read an address-sized word from the cache line, the cache line including a number of address-sized words;
- compare an upper N bits of the address-sized word with an upper N bits of the effective address of the cache line;
- and
- if the upper N bits of the address-sized word match the upper N bits of the effective address, identify the address-sized word as a candidate virtual address and generate a prefetch request for the candidate virtual address.
4 more elements
A method comprising:
- retrieving an effective address from a memory aligned cache line;
- reading an address-sized word from the memory aligned cache line;
- discarding the address-sized word if any one of K least significant bits of the address-sized word is non-zero;
- comparing an upper N bits of the address-sized word with an upper N bits of the effective address of the cache line;
- and
- if the upper N bits of the address-sized word match the upper N bits of the effective address, identifying the address-sized word as a candidate virtual address.
3 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.