Patent ID: 8700862

Claim:
A plurality of intermediate caches coupled to one or more clients, each intermediate cache comprising: a compression status bit cache configured to cache compression information for blocks of memory stored within a corresponding one of a plurality of portions of external memory; and a data cache unit configured to request, in response to a cache miss in the data cache unit involving a first memory access request received from a first client, compressed data from the corresponding one of the plurality of portions of external memory based on compression information associated with the first memory access request and stored in either the compression status bit cache or a data structure residing in the corresponding one of the plurality of portions of external memory, wherein the compression information indicates the number of bits that comprise the compressed data, and wherein the compressed data comprises a reduced set of data for representing the requested data, wherein each intermediate cache is coupled to the one or more clients via a memory crossbar and to the corresponding one of the plurality of portions of external memory, and wherein each intermediate cache is configured to access at least one data surface and the data structure storing compression information for and residing in the corresponding one of the plurality of portions of external memory.