Mapping Addresses to L3/CHA Slices in Intel Processors

Abstract

The distributed, shared L3 caches in Intel multicore processors are composed of “slices” (typically one “slice” per core), each assigned responsibility for a fraction of the address space. A high degree of interleaving of consecutive cache lines across the slices provides the appearance of a single cache resource shared by all cores. A family of undocumented hash functions is used to distribute addresses to slices, with different hash functions required for different numbers of slices. In all systems studied to date, the hash consists of a relatively short (16 to 16384 elements) “base sequence” of slice numbers, which is repeated with binary permutations for consecutive blocks of memory. The specific binary permutation used is selected by XOR-reductions of different subsets of the higher-order address bits. This report provides the base sequences and permutation select masks for Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (1st and 2nd generation) with 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28 slices, for 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with 28 slices, and for Xeon Phi x200 processors with 38 slices.

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