Prefetches are speculative, where either the SW or HW is trying to
load something into the cache in advance without knowing for sure that
it will be needed.  Demand accesses are driven by program loads and
stores and are necessary for the program to proceed.  They are both
just accesses to the L2, but they're flagged differently in the
request.  In a real system the cache could choose to deprioritize or
even drop prefetches since they're not critical to forward progress,
but I don't believe we do that in our models.

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 1:37 PM, Bob Nagel <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello, thanks for your answer Steve, I am very new to this world, and
> I do not see the difference between prefecth and demand, can you
> please expalin this to me?. For me both are the same just accesses to
> the L2.
>
> Thanks.
>
> 2008/12/18, Steve Reinhardt <[email protected]>:
>> "demand" is the complement of "prefetch".  "overall" includes both.
>>  by default there's no prefetching enabled, which is why they are
>>  typically the same.
>>
>>
>>  On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Bob Nagel <[email protected]> wrote:
>>  > Hello,
>>  >
>>  > Exploring the statistics genreated for the simulator, I do not
>>  > understand the difference between this two outputs:
>>  >
>>  > system.l2.overall_accesses                        482
>>  >     # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>>  >
>>  > system.l2.demand_accesses                         482
>>  >     # number of demand (read+write) accesses
>>  >
>>  > What is the difference between overall and demand, can anyone please
>>  > clarify me this?, thank you.
>>
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