Coalescing Write Buffers and Write Caches

• Coalescing write buffers

  • Writes to an address (block) already in the write buffer are combined
    • Note the tension between writing the coalescing buffer to memory at high rate -- more writes -- vs. coalescing to the max -- but buffer might become full

• Extend write buffers to small fully associative write caches with WB strategy and dirty bit/byte.

  • Not implemented in any machine I know of

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