A selective compressed memory system by on-line data decompressing

Abstract

The article proposes a selective compressed memory system (SCMS) focusing on a compressed cache architecture, in which only data blocks with good compression efficiency are compressed selectively and all compressed blocks are stored in a fixed memory space. The selective compression technique can reduce decompression overhead caused by online data decompression and also the fixed memory space allocation allows efficient management of the compressed blocks. The results from a trace driven simulation show that the SCMS approach can provide around a 35% decrease in the on-chip cache miss ratio as well as a 53% decrease in the data traffic over conventional memory systems. Furthermore, a large amount of the decompression overhead can be reduced, and thus the average memory access time can also be reduced by a maximum 20% against conventional memory systems.