Cache coherency is expensive and provides little or negative benefit for some tasks. So why is it still used so frequently?
Cache coherency, a common technique for improving performance in chips, is becoming less useful as general-purpose processors are supplemented with, and sometimes supplanted by, highly specialized accelerators and other processing elements.
While cache coherency won’t disappear anytime soon, it is increasingly being viewed as a luxury necessary to preserve a long-standing programming paradigm. As a result, architectures are beginning to limit its use whenever it makes sense…
To read the full Semiconductor Engineering article by Brian Bailey, click here.
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