Abstract: Methods and apparatus for starvation mitigation for associative cache designs. A memory controller employs an associative cache to cache physical page addresses and logic to monitor a level of cache contention. When the contention reaches a critical level where QoS can’t be guaranteed, a backpressure mechanism is triggered by cache contention mitigation logic to prevent new memory access commands from a host from entering a command pipeline. The mitigation logic maintains the backpressure until the monitoring logic indicates that the contention has resolved. The levels of contention that triggers and releases the backpressure may be set using configurable control registers. A starvation counter is incremented when a cache slot cannot be allocated for a command and decremented when a replayed command is allocated a slot. A starvation count is evaluated to determine when backpressure should be triggered and released.

Abstract: An embodiment of an integrated circuit may comprise local memory, a plurality of per-page counters located in a non-system-addressable region of the local memory, and circuitry coupled to the local memory, the circuitry to count accesses to pages of a system-addressable memory space with the plurality of per-page counters located in the non-system-addressable region of the local memory. Other embodiments are disclosed and claimed.