Dead stores意思

"Dead stores" is a term used in the context of computer science and specifically refers to cache memory. In a cache, dead stores refer to the situation where a cache line is written to, but the data is never accessed again. This can happen when a program writes to a location in the cache but then never reads from that location again before the cache line is evicted.

The term "dead" in this context means that the data is no longer useful or needed, and the writes to the cache line are essentially wasted. This can be a concern in computer systems where writes to cache are more expensive than reads, as dead stores can consume resources and potentially reduce the performance of the system.

To minimize the impact of dead stores, some cache designs use a technique called "write allocation" where a cache line is allocated for writing even if it is not currently in the cache. This can help to avoid unnecessary writes to main memory, but it can also lead to more dead stores in the cache if the written data is not subsequently read.