
648 CHAPTER 8 Directory-Based Cache Coherence
Effects of Assist Occupancy on Protocol Trade-Offs
The occupancy of the assist has an impact not only on the performance of a given
protocol but also on the trade-offs among protocols. We have seen that cache-based
protocols can have higher latency on write operations than memory-based protocols
since the transactions needed to invalidate sharers are serialized. The SCI cache-
based protocol also tends to have more protocol processing to do on a given memory
operation than a memory-based protocol, so the effective occupancy of the assist
tends to be significantly higher, especially when assists ar ...