Patent ID: 8441495

Claim:
A method of interlocking memory accesses to avoid corruption of compressed data and non-compressed data stored in a memory, comprising: receiving a read request to obtain existing data stored in a tile mapped to a surface stored in the memory; initiating a compression tag lookup to read a compression tag from an entry in a compression tag cache that corresponds to a position of the tile specified by the read request; reading the compression tag from the compression tag cache; determining if the existing data is represented in a compressed format or in a non-compressed format; and if the existing data is represented in a non-compressed format, then accepting the read request for arbitration to access the memory in order to receive the existing data; or if the existing data is represented in a compressed format and the position of the tile specified by the read request matches the position specified by any write requests that are queued for arbitration, then not accepting the read request for arbitration to access the memory.