What if block sizes are not equal among caches?

In all the books, packets of slides and similar I read, cache miss is always explained by assuming that blocks of different caches (or cache and RAM) are always of the same size. It's pretty clear how it's works in this case but the question is: what if block dimensions are not equal among caches?

For example, assuming a L1 cache of 8KB and 16B blocks (that implies 2^9 blocks) and a L2 cache of 512KB with 32B block (that implies 2^14 blocks). Assuming that a load have to be executed, i.e. LD R1,(0x0000AFAF) and suppose that there is a cache L1 miss and a cache L2 hit, what happens? What I mean is that i know that a block containing that addressed byte would be stored in L1 cache and i know where. The problem is what i have to save. I mean, have i to save half block of L2 cache (from 0x0000AFA0 to 0x0000AFAF) in a block of L1 cache or have i to save a block of L2 cache (from 0x0000AFA0 to 0x0000AFBf) in two block of L1 cache? Would be the same if i had cache + RAM instead?

To begin with, block sizes are usually equal across all levels of the cache hierarchy. I would like to see if someone has an example of a commercial architecture where is is not true. There are multiple reasons for this, all of which involve circuit complexity

Now, to answer your question, one could do either. When the processor requests a SP float (4 bytes), only 4 of the 16 (in your example) bytes from the block of the L1 are sent towards the pipeline. The same logic that selects this subset of bytes can be used to select the subset of 16 bytes (in your example) from the incoming block of 32 bytes.

Alternatively, you could over-write the neighboring block in L1 with data from the block of 32 bytes because spatial locality would imply you are likely to require this data soon.

StackExchange Computer Science Q#47009, answer score: 2