Snoop Filters for MPSoC Embedded Systems Advisors

Multicore systems have reached a stage where they are inevitable in the embedded world. This transition poses several challenges and opportunities in designing and programming these multicores in terms of achieving high performance while consuming less energy. One of the major challenges with multicore systems with caches is cache coherence. Existing snoopy based cache coherence protocols used in bus-based multicore architectures inher-ently cause heavy coherence traffic on the bus. By the very nature of these protocols, every transaction on the bus induces a look-up in the data cache of all remote CPUs in-order to check data consistency. Depending on a “hit ” or a “miss ” in the data cache, corrective action is undertaken. Pre-vious research works indicate a lot of scope for reducing energy consumed by these snoop look-ups; as about 90 % of these look-ups result in a data cache “miss”. In-order to take advantage of this, several snoop filtering techniques were proposed. In this project, we quantify the benefits of usin