2–12 Internal Architectur e
21264/EV68A Hardware Reference Manual
21264/EV68A Microarchitecture
Virtualtag bits [47:15]
8-bit addressspace number (ASN) field
1-bit addressspace match (ASM) bit
1-bit PALcodebit to indicate physical addressing
Validbit
Data andtag parity bits
Four access-checkbits for the following modes: kernel, executive, supervisor, and
user( KESU)
Additionalpredecoded information to assist with instruction processing and fetch
control
2.1.5.2 Data Cache
Thedata cache (Dcache) is a 64KB, 2-way set-associative, virtually indexed,physically
tagged,write-back, read/write allocate cache with 64-byte blocks. During each cycle
the Dcachecan perform one of the following transactions:
Twoquadword (or shorter) read transactions to arbitrary addresses
Twoquadword write transactions to the same aligned octaword
Twonon-overlapping less-than-quadword writes to the same aligned quadword
One sequential read and write transac tion from and to the same aligned octaword
Each Dcacheblock contains:
64 data bytes anda ssociatedquadword ECC bits
Physicaltag bits
Valid,dirty, shared, and modifiedbits
Tagparity bit calculated across the tag, dirty, shared, and modifiedbits
One bit to controlround-robin set allocation (one bit per two cache blocks)
The Dcache containstwo sets, each with 512 rows containing 64-byte blocks per row
(thatis, 32K bytes of data per set). The 21264/EV68A requirestwo additional bits of
virtualaddress beyond the bits that specify an 8KB page, in order to specify a Dcache
row index.A given virtual address might be found in fourunique locations in the
Dcache,depending on the virtual-to-physical translation for those two bits. The 21264/
EV68A preventsthis aliasing by keeping only one of the four possible translated
addresses in the cache at any time.
2.1.6 MemoryReference Unit
The memory referenceunit (Mbox) controls the Dcache and ensures architecturally
correctbehavior for load and store instructions. The Mbox contains the following struc-
tures:
Load queue (LQ)
Storequeue (SQ)