Performance evaluation of link-based cache coherence schemes

The authors have evaluated the implementation and performance tradeoffs between three directory-based cache coherence protocols. They study two link-based approaches, called tree-based and linear-list protocols, and contrast their performance and implementation cost with that of a full-map protocol. Using program-driven simulation and a set of three benchmark programs, it was found that tree-based and linear-list protocols performed almost as well as full-map protocols but with a considerably lower implementation cost. However, if the sharing set is large, linear-list schemes may suffer because of the large write latency while tree-based protocols still perform well.