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Subject: Re: Move ordering ?

Author: James Robertson

Date: 07:59:14 10/26/98

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On October 25, 1998 at 13:28:05, Robert Hyatt wrote:

[....]

>>
>>I still have problems understanding. Suppose you have, starting at address 0,
>>four 8-bit values. If you access the first, then the whole "clump" of 32 bytes
>>are loaded into the L2 cache. Ok, that makes sense.
>>
>>Suppose you access the second byte in chunk 0. Does the computer load chunk 0
>>(bytes 0-3) into memory? or does it load bytes 1-4 into memory? Thanks for the
>>help!
>>
>>James
>>
>
>cache lines are *always* aligned on 32 byte boundaries...  so if you access
>*any* byte between 0 and 31, all the bytes in the line get loaded from bytes
>0-31 in memory...  non-boundary aligned caches were done many years ago, but
>cause problems with todays 32 bit "banks"...
>

Ok, this clears up one problem I got from not reading enough of the previous
messages in this thread.... the cache is 32 bytes long, not 32 bits. Suppose you
have an array, say, of 50 3-bit structures. Obviously 32 is not divisible by 3,
so will the machine "split" a structure between two lines? Obviously this is
necessary for huge structures, but are smaller treated differently?

James





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