Enabling Hybrid PCM Memory System with Inherent Memory Management

Abstract

Replacing the traditional volatile main memory, e.g., DRAM, with a non-volatile phase change memory (PCM) has become a possible solution to reduce the energy consumption of computing systems. To further reduce the bit cost of PCM, the development trend of PCM goes from single-level-cell (SLC) the multi-level-cell (MLC) technology. However, the worse endurance and the intolerable long write latency hinder a MLC PCM from being used as the main memory of computing systems. In this work, we propose a memory management design to facilitate enabling the use of hybrid PCMas main memory to achieve a better trade-off between the cost and the performance of PCM-based computing systems, where the hybrid PCM is composed of SLC PCM and MLC PCM. In particular, the proposed design can be seamlessly integrated into the inherent memory management of modern operation systems without additional hardware components. The evaluation results show that the proposed design over a hybrid PCM can improve the average read/write performance for almost 10 times and extend the lifetime for more than 32 times, compared to systems with pure MLC PCM.