US Patent:
20120072702, Mar 22, 2012
Inventors:
Matthew D. Pierson - Murphy TX, US
Joseph R.M. Zbiciak - Arlington TX, US
Kai Chirca - Richardson TX, US
Amitabh Menon - Lewisville TX, US
Timothy D. Anderson - Dallas TX, US
International Classification:
G06F 9/312
Abstract:
A prefetch cancelation arbiter improves access to a shared memory resource by arbitrarily canceling speculative prefetches. The prefetch cancelation arbiter applies a set of arbitrary policies to speculative prefetches to select one or more of the received speculative prefetches to cancel. The selected speculative prefetches are canceled and a cancelation notification of each canceled speculative prefetch is sent to a higher-level memory component such as a prefetch unit or a local memory arbiter that is local to the processor associated with the canceled speculative prefetch. The set of arbitrary policies is used to reduce memory accesses to the shared memory resource.