1

An apparatus comprising:one or more memories to store data for access by a consumer agent; and

a monitor agent to monitor access by a producer agent or the consumer agent to the one or more memories and to cause data to be moved, at a time determined by the monitor agent and not as part of a request from the consumer agent, from a first memory to a second memory that is accessible by the consumer agent with less latency than the first memory.

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2

The apparatus defined in Claim 1 wherein the one or more memories include one or more levels of cache memory.

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3

The apparatus defined in Claim 2 wherein the monitor agent directs the placement of data into a lower level cache memory prior to the time the data will first be accessed by the consumer agent.

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4

The apparatus defined in Claim 1 wherein the monitor agent is transparent to one or both of the producer agent and the consumer agent and autonomously monitors access by at least one of the producer agent and the consumer agent to data structures in memory and uses that information to determine when to the data to be moved closer to the consumer agent.

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5

The apparatus defined in Claim 4 wherein the monitor agent monitors cache activity indicators to determine when to issue prefetch hints to cause an externally directed prefetch to move the data closer to the consumer agent.

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6

The apparatus defined in Claim 1 wherein the monitor agent is transparent to one of the producer agent and consumer agent and autonomously monitors access by at least one of the producer agent and consumer agent to data structures in memory, and receives indications from the other of the producer agent and the consumer agent and uses that information to determine when to deliver data closer to the consumer agent.

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7

The apparatus defined in Claim 1 wherein the monitor agent is part of the consumer agent.

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8

The apparatus defined in Claim 7 wherein the monitor agent comprises a first one or more threads running on a processor agent and the consumer agent comprises one or more additional threads running on the processor that acts to consume the data.

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9

The apparatus defined in Claim 1 wherein the monitor agent receives explicit indications from the consumer agent to determine when to issue data placement commands to cause the data placement.

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10

The apparatus defined in Claim 1 wherein the monitor agent further receives explicit indications from the producer agent to determine when to issue data placement commands to cause the data placement.

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