US Patent 9755997 Efficient peer-to-peer communication support in SoC fabrics

Methods and apparatus for efficient peer-to-peer communication support in interconnect fabrics. Network interfaces associated with agents are implemented to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions between agents in a manner that ensures data accesses correspond to the most recent update for each agent. This is implemented, in part, via use of non-posted “dummy writes” that are sent from an agent when the destination between write transactions originating from the agent changes. The dummy writes ensure that data corresponding to previous writes reach their destination prior to subsequent write and read transactions, thus ordering the peer-to-peer transactions without requiring the use of a centralized transaction ordering entity.