Methods and apparatus are provided for supplying data to a processor in a
digital processing system. The method includes holding data required by the processor
in a cache memory, supplying data from the cache memory to the processor in response
to processor requests, performing a cache line fill operation in response to a
chache miss, supplying data from a prefetch buffer to the cache memory in response
to the cache line fill operation, and speculatively loading data from a lower level
memory to the prefetch buffer in response to the cache line fill operation.
