A Computer Architecture with System Attributes on Individual Operands

The access control on data is normally on per page basis and is implemented in the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) via page tables managed by memory management of operating systems. To optimize the memory reference performance, operating systems specify if a page of data should be encached or not, so that unnecessary and undesirable data encaching will be avoided. It is also desirable to be able to specify if maintaining data coherency in a multiprocessing system is required. Such maintenance demands a lot of checking, which creates performance bottlenecks and system complexity, but only a small percentage of data requires absolute data coherency. In all these cases, pages are not logical entities for such attributes or characteristic assignments. Better choices are the operands, which are the direct mapping of the variables in a program. In this paper, we are proposing an architecture to support the access control, the maintenance requirement of data coherency and optional encaching on data as system attributes on individual operands. There are other system attributes for future expansions briefly mentioned, such as system support, debugging, and monitoring features.