Lazy Precharge: An overhead-free method to reduce precharge overhead for memory parallelism improvement of DRAM system

Abstract

As we enter the multi-core era, the main memory becomes the bottleneck due to the exploded memory requests. In this work, we propose a novel memory architecture-Lazy Precharge (LaPRE) that enables aggressive activation schemes so that multiple rows in a bank can be activated successively without the interrupt from precharges. Therefore, LaPRE effectively reduces the precharge overhead and thus improves memory parallelism. In addition, three memory scheduling schemes are proposed correspondingly to fully make use of the improved memory parallelism. The experimental results show that LaPRE can achieve 14% performance improvement on average without hardware overhead.