Chapter 20 - Architecting the last-level cache for GPUs using STT-MRAM nonvolatile memory

Abstract

The key to high performance on graphics processor units (GPUs) is the massive threading that helps GPUs hide memory access latency with maximum thread-level parallelism (TLP). Although, increasing the TLP and the number of cores does not result in enhanced performance because of thread contention for memory resources such as last-level cache. The future GPUs will have larger last-level cache (L2 in GPU), based on the current trends in VLSI technology and GPU architectures toward increasing the number of processing cores. Larger L2 caches inevitably have larger power consumption. In this chapter, having investigated the behavior of general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) applications, we present an efficient L2 cache architecture for GPUs based on solid transfer-torque RAM (STT-RAM) technology. Because of its high density and low power characteristics, STT-RAM technology can be utilized in GPUs where numerous cores leave a limited area for on-chip memory banks. They have, however, two important issues, high energy and latency of write operations, that have to be addressed. Low-retention time STT-RAMs can reduce the energy and delay of write operations. Nevertheless, employing STT-RAMs with low-retention time in GPUs requires a thorough study on the behavior of GPGPU applications. The STT-RAM L2 cache architecture proposed in this chapter can improve IPC by up to 171% (20%, on average), and reduce the average consumed power by 28.9% compared to a conventional L2 cache architecture with an equal on-chip area.