US Patent 7454573 Cost-conscious pre-emptive cache line displacement and relocation mechanisms

A hardware based method for determining when to migrate cache lines to the cache bank closest to the requesting processor to avoid remote access penalty for future requests. In a preferred embodiment, decay counters are enhanced and used in determining the cost of retaining a line as opposed to replacing it while not losing the data. In one embodiment, a minimization of off-chip communication is sought; this may be particularly useful in a CMP environment.