A method and apparatus for verification of coherence for shared cache components in a system verification environment are provided. With the method and apparatus, stores to the cache are applied to a cache functional simulator in the order that they occur in the trace information from the canonical tracers. However, rather than updating the cache simulator with the actual data stored, the performed time of the store event is applied to the simulator as data. The cache simulator stores the latest performed time for each byte of each cache line in the simulated cache, in an associated data structure. For each load event that is encountered in the trace information for a byte, a comparison is made between a global expected data age of the data in the cache and the performed time associated with the byte. If the data age in the simulated cache for the byte is less than the global expected data age, i.e. a latest previously encountered data age, then a cache coherence violation has occurred.