Improving energy efficiency by making DRAM less randomly accessed

Abstract

Existing techniques manage power for the main memory by passively monitoring the memory traffic, and based on which, predict when to power down and into which low-power state to transition. However, passively monitoring the memory traffic can be far from being effective as idle periods between consecutive memory accesses are often too short for existing power-management techniques to take full advantage of the deeper power-saving state implemented in modem DRAM architectures. In this paper, the authors proposed a new technique that will actively reshape the memory traffic to coalesce short idle periods - which were previously unusable for power management - into longer ones, thus enabling existing techniques to effectively exploit idleness in the memory.