Computer Hardware Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

Snooping protocol, also known as a bus-snooping protocol, is for maintaining cache coherency in symmetric multiprocessing environments. The basic idea behind this protocol is that writes to a location invalidate other caches' copies of the block and reads by other processors on invalidated data cause cache misses. If two processors write at the same time, one wins and obtains exclusive access.

Related Terms

snooping protocol