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The meanings of AxCACHE

Hi everyone,

I just finish studying AMBA 4 AXI and AMBA 3 AXI protocol. I'm confused  about something.

In chapter A4.1, transaction type and attribute, mentioning about AxCACHE and its description . But I can't get the meaning of some features as below

For write, a number of different transactions can be merged together , and read transaction can be prefetched. Could someone explain it more precise for me?

I'm so appreciate for that.

  • I would recommend using the AXI4 definition of this bit, as it was changed to more accurate describe the functionality.  In AXI4, AxCACHE[1] is the Modifiable bit. 

    What this bit really means is whether this access is going to Normal memory (AxCACHE[1] = 1) or Device memory, where Device memory generally requires that the transaction attributes are not changed as they travel through system as the accesses have side effects.

    If AxCACHE[1] = 1, we can then modify the transaction attributes meaning for example that we can merge accesses.  For example, if you have separate byte access to 0x0, 0x4 and 0x5, then on a 64 bit bus we could merge these three accesses into a single transaction with AxSIZE = 64 bit, where if this was a write we would use the WSTRBs to indicate which bytes were valid.  

    If AxCACHE[1] = 0 in the above example, then the system would not be allowed to optimise these 3 byte accesses into a single transaction.

    With regards to prefetching, accesses to Device memory (AxCACHE[1] = 0) do not allow prefetching as these areas can have side effects.  For example, reading a FIFO entry might remove the data from the head of the FIFO, and so it's not safe to prefetch to this location.