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crabcake

Memory and cache both can provide the correct data since processor holding the E or S state of that cache line have not modified it. But which one is faster?

williamx

I think accessing from cache is often faster because many applications are bounded by memory bandwidth and latency.

atadkase

Consider the following situation: 1. Processor A has a copy of X in the shared state. 2. Processor B modifies X. This forces A to change X to invalid. 3. Processor C issues an intent to read X. In this case, is it possible for the cache of processor A to just tap into the bus and update its own copy of the variable (resulting into the shared state) while the entire flush sequence is going on? (As a possible optimization?)