Hybrid Main Memory for High Bandwidth Multi-Core System

Abstract

In the hybrid main memory sub-system which consists of DRAM and phase change RAM (PRAM), DRAM is often used as a cache. Such a configuration of DRAM cache and PRAM main memory has two problems. First, it requires high bandwidth of data movement between DRAM and PRAM due to the large granularity (i.e., DRAM row) of caching. Second, the memory bandwidth of PRAM is not fully utilized since it can be accessed only by the DRAM cache thereby limiting the memory bandwidth of hybrid main memory to that of DRAM cache. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture where both DRAM and PRAM can be accessed in parallel for higher memory performance. We analyze that the performance and fairness of hybrid memory sub-system is limited by the stall time at the data queue of memory controller. In order to resolve this problem, we propose caching data selectively in a way to reduce stall time thereby reducing memory access latency and improving fairness. Our experimental results show significant improvements in performance (by an average of 21 percent), fairness (by 2.1 times), and energy consumption (by 10 percent) compared with the best of the existing methods in a multi-core system which consists of multiple CPUs and GPU.