Patent ID: 8266382

Claim:
A method for interfacing between a level-one (L1) cache and multiple clients that share the L1 cache, comprising: preparing a request by one of the multiple clients for output to the L1 cache, the request specifying a read operation, a write operation, or a read/write (read and write) operation; receiving hint information by the one of the multiple clients from the L1 cache; determining that a read bubble, a write bubble, or a read/write bubble should be inserted into the request based on the hint information; updating the request to produce an updated request by: removing the read operation when the hint information specifies that the read bubble should be inserted into the request, removing the write operation when the hint information specifies that the write bubble should be inserted into the request, or removing the read/write operation when the hint information specifies that the read/write bubble should be inserted into the request; and outputting the updated request to the L1 cache.