Portions of a cache are flushed in stages. An exemplary flushing of the present invention comprises flushing a first portion, performing operations other than a flush, and then flushing a second portion of the cache. The first portion may be disabled after it is flushed. The cache may be functionally divided into portions prior to a flush, or the portions may be determined in part by an abort signal. The operations may access either the cache or the memory. The operations may involve direct memo...

The invention provides for cache organization of texture information and a method and apparatus for accessing cached texture information and an index for cached information. Texels are represented in two dimensions and stored in groups referred to as tiles. Cache is configured to contain multiple tiles of texture image data, each tile being stored as a line in the cache. A cache line can be multidimensional (e.g., two or three or more dimensions) and may be viewed as an identifiable storage elem...

A cache system is provided which includes a cache memory and a cache refill mechanism which allocates one or more of a set of cache partitions in the cache memory to an item in dependence on the address of the item in main memory. This is achieved in one of the described embodiments by including with the address of an item a set of partition selector bits which allow a partition mask to be generated to identify into which cache partition the item may be loaded.

A data grouping means divides data items stored in a cache memory section into groups of data having different access patterns. The priority assigning means assigns an order of priorities to data items in each group that the priority assigning means manages according to an individual caching algorithm. The lowest priority determining means determines the lowest priority group when there is not enough unused memory space in the cache memory section and it is necessary to purge a data item. The da...

A method and data processing apparatus comprise a cache having a plurality of data entries; an eviction buffer comprising an information portion and a data portion; and eviction logic to transfer information associated with a first of the plurality of data entries from the cache to the information portion and to determine, with reference to the information, whether the first of the plurality of data entries should be written to a memory by examining the information. If it is determined that the ...

Described herein are methods and apparatus, including computer program products, that implement cache eviction for runtime systems. A computer program product can cause a data processing apparatus to compute a fill level of a cache memory; use a first eviction process to evict one or more of the entities in the cache memory if the fill level exceeds a first threshold but not a second threshold; use a second, distinct eviction process to evict one or more of the entities in the cache memory if th...

A NoDMA cache including a super page field. The super page field indicates when a set of pages contain protected information. The NoDMA cache is used by a computer system to deny I/O device access to protected information in system memory.

Portions of a cache are flushed in stages. An exemplary flushing of the present invention comprises flushing a first portion, performing operations other than a flush, and then flushing a second portion of the cache. The first portion may be disabled after it is flushed. The cache may be functionally divided into portions prior to a flush, or the portions may be determined in part by an abort signal. The operations may access either the cache or the memory. The operations may involve direct memo...

A cache system is provided which includes a cache memory and a cache refill mechanism which allocates one or more of a set of cache partitions in the cache memory to an item in dependence on the address of the item in main memory. This is achieved in one of the described embodiments by including with the address of an item a set of partition selector bits which allow a partition mask to be generated to identify into which cache partition the item may be loaded.

A cache/disk subsystem includes a storage control unit, a relatively low capacity high speed cache store, and a higher capacity slower memory such as a plurality of disk drive devices. The storage control unit controls the subsystem to transfer from the cache store to the disk drive devices segments of data which have been modified while resident in the cache store and insures that space will be available in the cache store for new data if a particular operation requires that new data be transfe...