A Metadata Prefetching Mechanism for Hybrid Memory Architectures

Abstract

A hybrid memory, which is the main memory consisting of two distinct memory devices, is expected to achieve a good balance between high performance and large capacity. However, unlike a traditional memory, the hybrid memory needs the metadata for data management and requires additional access latency for their references. To hide the latency, this paper proposes a metadata prefetching mechanism considering the address differences to control the prefetching. The evaluation results show that the proposed mechanism increases the metadata hit rate in two-thirds of the examined benchmarks and improves IPC by up to 34% and 6% on average.