CROW: A low-cost substrate for improving DRAM performance, energy efficiency, and reliability

Hasan Hassan, Minesh Patel, Jeremie S. Kim, A. Giray Yaglikci, Nandita Vijaykumar, Nika Mansouri Ghiasi, Saugata Ghose, Onur Mutlu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationISCA 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages129-142
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450366694
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 22 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2019 - Phoenix, United States
Duration: Jun 22 2019Jun 26 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture
ISSN (Print)1063-6897

Conference

Conference46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ISCA 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhoenix
Period6/22/196/26/19

Keywords

  • DRAM
  • Energy
  • Memory systems
  • Performance
  • Power
  • Reliability

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture

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