Abstract: A method and apparatus to implement monitor primitives when a processor employs an inclusive shared last level cache. By the employing an inclusive last level cache, the processor is almost always able to complete a monitor transaction without requiring self snooping through the system interconnect.

Abstract: A home node aware replacement policy for a cache chooses to evict lines which belong to local memory over lines which belong to remote memory, reducing the average transaction cost of incorrect cache line replacements. With each entry, the cache stores a t-bit cost metric (t?1) representing a relative distance between said cache and an originating memory for the respective cache entry. Responsive to determining that no cache entry corresponds to an access request, the replacement policy selects a cache entry for eviction from the cache based at least in part on the t-bit cost metric. The selected cache entry is then evicted from the cache.

Abstract: The present invention presents an efficient way to implement global ordering between a system interconnect and internal core interfaces in a MCMP system. In particular, snooping transactions on the system interconnect, processor requests, and processor request completions may trigger corresponding snooping transactions and request completions to the cores. The order in which the transactions are observed on the system interconnect may impose the order in which the transaction triggered to the core are generated. Since this ordering is between multiple interfaces this is referred to as global ordering.