I think the 2009 tag is really important here. The memory layout of Intel's chip has changed quite a bit since 2009. Core 2 chips didn't even have L3 cache at t

I think the 2009 tag is really important here. The memory layout of Intel's chip has changed quite a bit since 2009. Core 2 chips didn't even have L3 cache at the time. The next article in this series talks about the Northbridge which has long since been replaced by onchip integrated memory controllers and the a PCIe root complex. On top of that both Intel and AMD brand new chips no longer have inclusive caches which is a big departure for the inclusive hierarchy that has been around for years. As mentioned in the article the inclusive nature of the cache is important for multi threading applications since the L3 cache always contains the master copy of a cacheline and threads can always load the latest copy from L3 . I doubt that the behavior of chips will change but it will be interesting to see how this affects multi threaded programs going forward.