A memory arbiter minimizes latency of memory accesses in a system having multiple processors. The memory arbiter improves overall system performance by managing the memory requests from each processor individually before those requests are sent to a central memory arbiter for handling memory requests for the shared resources from the multiple processors. The local memory arbiter buffers the memory requests from a local processor, analyzes the buffered memory requests, and optimizes the requests by reordering commands according to a rule set, and by performing write merging and prefetch squashing in certain conditions.