
Hardware/Software Trade-Offs
This chapter addresses the potential limitations of the directory-based, cache-
coherent systems discussed in Chapter 8 and the hardware/software trade-offs that
arise in overcoming these limitations. The primary limitations of those systems are
the following:
■ High waiting time at memory operations. Sequential consistency (SC) is the
memory consistency model of choice for the programmer and, so far, has been
assumed for both snooping and directory-based systems. To satisfy the suffi-
cient conditions for SC, a processor would have to wait for its previous mem-
ory operation to complete before issuing the next one ...