caching - What is the semantics for Super Queue and Line Fill buffers?

Question

I am asking this question regarding Haswell Microarchitetcure(Intel Xeon E5-2640-v3 CPU). From the specifications of the CPU and other resources I found out that there are 10 LFBs and Size of the super queue is 16. I have two questions related to LFBs and SuperQueues:

1) What will be the maximum degree of memory level parallelism the system can provide, 10 or 16(LFBs or SQ)?

2) According to some sources every L1D miss is recorded in SQ and then SQ assigns the Line fill buffer and at some other sources they have written that SQ and LFBs can work independently. Could you please explain the working of SQ in brief?

Here is the example figure(Not for Haswell) for SQ and LFB. References: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.pdf

http://www.realworldtech.com/haswell-cpu/

Answer 1

For (1) logically the maximum parallelism would be limited by the least-parallel part of the pipeline which is the 10 LFBs, and this is probably strictly true for demand-load parallelism when prefetching is disabled or can't help. In practice, everything is more complicated once your load is at least partly helped by prefetching, since then the wider queues between L2 and RAM can be used which could make the observed parallelism greater than 10. The most practical approach is probably direct measurement: given measured latency to RAM, and observed throughput, you can calculate an effective parallelism for any particular load.

For (2) my understanding is that it is the other way around: all demand misses in L1 first allocate into the LFB (unless of course they hit an existing LFB) and may involve the "superqueue" later (or whatever it is called these days) if they also miss higher in the cache hierarchy. The diagram you included seems to confirm that: the only path from the L1 is through the LFB queue.