Serial lookup of tag ways
US10324850B2 · kind B2 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Nov 11, 2016 |
| Grant date | Jun 18, 2019 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Jun 28, 2037 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC Y)Emerging Cross-Sectional Technologies
- CPC primaryY02D10/00
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A cache system is configurable to trade power consumption for cache access latency. When it is desired for a system with a cache to conserve dynamic power, the lookup of accesses (e.g., snoops) to cache tag ways is serialized to perform one (or less than all) tag way access per clock (or even slower). Thus, for an N-way set associative cache, instead of performing a lookup/comparison on the N tag ways in parallel, the lookups are performed one tag way at a time. This take N times more cycles thereby reducing the access/snoop bandwidth by a factor of N. However, the power consumption of the serialized access when compared to ‘all parallel’ accesses/snoops is reduced.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.