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To: Jay who wrote (69204)	11/30/1998 1:06:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

<How about "snooping" on writes in a multi-processor machine? I believe only a hardware cache can do this.> What does this have to do with prefetching? But to answer your question, if a hardware cache can't snoop writes in a multiprocessor machine, then cache coherency will have to be enforced by software (e.g. semaphores). This becomes insanely costly in performance and prone to bugs when different processors are working on the same set of data. <I'm only a novice at this but I suspect snooping is also needed on DMA writes by hard-disks.> Unless the section of memory is marked as uncacheable by the processor (and I can't imagine why), snooping is needed on DMA writes by hard disks. Tenchusatsu