Hard Processor System Technical Reference Manual: Agilex™ 5 SoCs

ID 814346
Date 4/01/2024
Public
Document Table of Contents

4.1.2. CCU Use Cases

The main use case for CCU is to support a system where an accelerator implemented in soft logic shares data with the Cortex-A55 and/or Cortex-A76 cores in the DSU. An example is a EMAC (TSN) endpoint as shown in the following diagram.

Figure 18. Data Sharing in EMAC (TSN) Endpoint

In such a system, the CPU(s) must be notified when soft logic is about to update shared data so that the L1, L2, and L3 caches can invalidate any clean cache lines associated with the new data or write any dirty lines back to main memory. Similarly, any read performed by the soft logic accelerator must return the latest copy of data whether it is located in main memory or one of the previously stated caches. It is the job of CCU to ensure that every transaction initiator shares a common view of main memory, even if the latest data is not resident in main memory. The CCU does this by maintaining a directory of all the cache lines that are resident in the L3 cache so that the proper cache maintenance commands can be issued when needed. This eliminates the requirement for cache maintenance software, and thus improves system performance.