BOOM

Abstract

To address the real-time processing needs of large and growing amounts of data, modern software increasingly uses main memory as the primary data store for critical information. This trend creates a new emphasis on high-capacity, high-bandwidth, and high-reliability main memory systems. Conventional and recently-proposed server memory techniques can satisfy these requirements, but at the cost of significantly increased memory power, a key constraint for future memory systems. In this paper, we exploit the low-power nature of another high volume memory component---mobile DRAM---while improving its bandwidth and reliability shortcomings with a new DIMM architecture. We propose Buffered Output On Module (BOOM) that buffers the data outputs from multiple ranks of low-frequency mobile DRAM devices, which in aggregation provide high bandwidth and achieve chipkill-correct or even stronger reliability. Our evaluation shws that BOOM can reduce main memory power by more than 73% relative to the baseline chipkill system, while improving average performance by 5% and providing strong reliability. For memory-intensive applications, BOOM can improve performance by 30--40%.