A method and system for reducing latency of a snoop tenure. A bus macro may receive
a snoopable transfer request. The bus macro may determine which snoop controllers
in a system will participate in the snoop transaction. The bus macro may then identify
which participating snoop controllers are passive. Passive snoop controllers are
snoop controllers associated with cache memories with cache lines only in the shared
or invalid states of the MESI protocol. The snoop request may then be completed
by the bus macro without waiting to receive responses from the passive participating
snoop controllers. By not waiting for responses from passive snoop controllers,
the bus macro may be able to complete the snoop request in a shorter amount of
time thereby reducing the latency of the snoop tenure and improving performance
of the system bus.