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Why on-chip cache coherence is here to stay

Publication ,  Journal Article
Martin, MMK; Hill, MD; Sorin, DJ
Published in: Communications of the ACM
July 1, 2012

The article discusses how on-chip hardware coherence can scale gracefully as the number of cores increases. Cache coherence has come to dominate the market for technical, as well as for legacy, reasons. Technically, hardware cache coherence provides performance generally superior to what is achievable with software-implemented coherence. Coherence's alleged lack of scalability arises from claims of unscalable storage and interconnection network traffic and concerns over latency and energy. Before investigating the issues involved in coherence's future, one first needs to describe today's cache coherence protocols. When a core issues a load or store that misses in its private cache, it issues a coherence request message to the shared cache. Based on the block's coherence state and per-core tracking bits, the shared cache either responds directly or forwards the request to the one or more cores that need to respond to the request.

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Published In

Communications of the ACM

DOI

EISSN

1557-7317

ISSN

0001-0782

Publication Date

July 1, 2012

Volume

55

Issue

7

Start / End Page

78 / 89

Related Subject Headings

  • Information Systems
  • 46 Information and computing sciences
  • 08 Information and Computing Sciences
 

Citation

APA
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ICMJE
MLA
NLM
Martin, M. M. K., Hill, M. D., & Sorin, D. J. (2012). Why on-chip cache coherence is here to stay. Communications of the ACM, 55(7), 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1145/2209249.2209269
Martin, M. M. K., M. D. Hill, and D. J. Sorin. “Why on-chip cache coherence is here to stay.” Communications of the ACM 55, no. 7 (July 1, 2012): 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1145/2209249.2209269.
Martin MMK, Hill MD, Sorin DJ. Why on-chip cache coherence is here to stay. Communications of the ACM. 2012 Jul 1;55(7):78–89.
Martin, M. M. K., et al. “Why on-chip cache coherence is here to stay.” Communications of the ACM, vol. 55, no. 7, July 2012, pp. 78–89. Scopus, doi:10.1145/2209249.2209269.
Martin MMK, Hill MD, Sorin DJ. Why on-chip cache coherence is here to stay. Communications of the ACM. 2012 Jul 1;55(7):78–89.

Published In

Communications of the ACM

DOI

EISSN

1557-7317

ISSN

0001-0782

Publication Date

July 1, 2012

Volume

55

Issue

7

Start / End Page

78 / 89

Related Subject Headings

  • Information Systems
  • 46 Information and computing sciences
  • 08 Information and Computing Sciences