29 September 1997 – Subject To Change
Clocks, Cache, and External Interface
4–5
Introduction to the External Interface
Figure 4–2 Merits of a Multiprobes In Flight – Pipelined Cache
4.1.2.3 Write Interleaving
The 21164PC Bcache interface takes advantage of the SSRAM address input register
to employ interleaving techniques to maximize write-hit dirty bandwidth. The
Bcache interface decouples the tag and data store control to allow tag write probes to
be interleaved with data writes. Figure 4–3 shows an example of write interleaving
and its ability to keep the data bus at 100% utilization.
PCA002
index
data
A1
A1
index
data
A2
A3
A2
A3
A4
A5
A6
A8
A7
D10 D11
D20 D21
Nonpipelined Cache:
Pipelined Cache:
D10 D11 D20
D30
D21
D31 D40
D50
D41
D51
latency 1
latency 2
latency 1
latency 2
latency 3
Pipelining allows 100% utilization of the data bus.
Multiple probes in flight