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> The downsides of MESI are that (a) it requires broadcasts

No, it can be implemented with directory instead, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory-based_cache_coherenc...

Or various combinations of snooping and directories ("snoop filters", or directories that act as "bridges" between broadcast domains, etc.).

In current Xeon processors (and presumably AMD EPYC as well, thought I don't yet have first-hand experience with those), you have a couple of directories per CPU with snoop filtering, as with tens of cores broadcasting becomes a scalability bottleneck. In the BIOS you can change the mode how it operates, with slightly different names and semantics depending on the CPU generation.




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