Chapter 6: Allison Hamann, Chris Barile

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=876437

Sector Cache

A. Organziation

1) Sectors
2) Subsectors
3) Validity Bit

B. Load Procedure

1) Sector miss
2) Subsector miss

C. Advantages

Sector Caches are organized into sectors and subsectors. A sector is a collection of smaller subsectors. Subsectors are similar to lines in a direct-mapped cache. Each subsector has a "validity bit" which tells whether or not that subsector has been loaded into cache from the main storage.

When a process requests data that is not in the cache, a cache sector is assigned to the sector on the main storage device where the requested data is stored. Then a portion of that sector, known as the subsector, is loaded into the cache. The subsector's validity bit is then set to reflect that it has been loaded from the main storage. When a process requests data from the loaded sector that is not already in the cache, the subsector it is in becomes loaded into memory.