Paper Info
Title
CROW: a low-cost substrate for improving DRAM performance, energy efficiency, and reliability
Abstract
DRAM has been the dominant technology for architecting main memory for decades. Recent trends in multi-core system design and large-dataset applications have amplified the role of DRAM as a critical system bottleneck. We propose Copy-Row DRAM (CROW), a flexible substrate that enables new mechanisms for improving DRAM performance, energy efficiency, and reliability. We use the CROW substrate to implement 1) a low-cost in-DRAM caching mechanism that lowers DRAM activation latency to frequently-accessed rows by 38% and 2) a mechanism that avoids the use of short-retention-time rows to mitigate the performance and energy overhead of DRAM refresh operations. CROW's flexibility allows the implementation of both mechanisms at the same time. Our evaluations show that the two mechanisms synergistically improve system performance by 20.0% and reduce DRAM energy by 22.3% for memory-intensive four-core workloads, while incurring 0.48% extra area overhead in the DRAM chip and 11.3 KiB storage overhead in the memory controller, and consuming 1.6% of DRAM storage capacity, for one particular implementation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3307650.3322231
Proceedings of the 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
DRAM, energy, memory systems, performance, power, reliability
Row,Dram,Bottleneck,Computer science,Efficient energy use,Latency (engineering),Critical system,Parallel computing,Systems design,Memory controller,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6897
978-1-4503-6669-4
12
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.42
53
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hasan Hassan135217.76
Minesh Patel22049.82
Jeremie Kim326313.68
Abdullah Giray Yaglikci4432.51
Nandita Vijaykumar51467.55
Nika Mansouri Ghiasi6402.38
Saugata Ghose771836.45
Onur Mutlu89446357.40