EMBEDDED Intel486™ PROCESSOR HARDWARE REFERENCE MANUAL
9-6
Figure 9-1. Cache Hit Rate for Various Programs
9.3.3
Bus Cycle Mix with and without On-Chip Cache
Microprocessors that lack an on-chip cache must devote a significant portion of execution time
to external bus accesses. Code prefetches and data reads must come from the external memory
system; subsequently a high percentage of bus accesses are reads. Traditional memory systems
are optimized for reads because of this mix of bus cycles.
With the Intel486 processor’s on-chip cache, however, the high hit rate reduces the number of ex-
ternal reads. As the on-chip cache implements a write-through policy, the number of writes to the
bus is not reduced. As a result, external bus read cycles are now a minor portion of the overall
Table 9-2. Programs Used
Name
Description
A
FRAME
Desktop publishing package
B
PHONGS4
Small benchmark program
C
Sunview
Window manager
D
INVFRAME
Desktop publishing package
E
TPASCAL
Pascal compiler
F
TROFF
Text Formatter
On-Chip Cache Hit Rates
A
B
C
D
E
75.00%
80.00%
85.00%
90.00%
95.00%
100.00%
Hi
t Ra
te
Program
Prefetches
Reads
Summary of Contents for Embedded Intel486
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