Adwait Jog, Asit K. Mishra, Cong Xu, Yuan Xie, N. Vijaykrishnan, R. Iyer, C. Das
{"title":"Cache revive: Architecting volatile STT-RAM caches for enhanced performance in CMPs","authors":"Adwait Jog, Asit K. Mishra, Cong Xu, Yuan Xie, N. Vijaykrishnan, R. Iyer, C. Das","doi":"10.1145/2228360.2228406","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"High density, low leakage and non-volatility are the attractive features of Spin-Transfer-Torque-RAM (STT-RAM), which has made it a strong competitor against SRAM as a universal memory replacement in multi-core systems. However, STT-RAM suffers from high write latency and energy which has impeded its widespread adoption. To this end, we look at trading-off STT-RAM's non-volatility property (data-retention-time) to overcome these problems. We formulate the relationship between retention-time and write-latency, and find optimal retention-time for architecting an efficient cache hierarchy using STT-RAM. Our results show that, compared to SRAM-based design, our proposal can improve performance and energy consumption by 18% and 60%, respectively.","PeriodicalId":263599,"journal":{"name":"DAC Design Automation Conference 2012","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2012-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"275","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"DAC Design Automation Conference 2012","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2228360.2228406","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 275
Abstract
High density, low leakage and non-volatility are the attractive features of Spin-Transfer-Torque-RAM (STT-RAM), which has made it a strong competitor against SRAM as a universal memory replacement in multi-core systems. However, STT-RAM suffers from high write latency and energy which has impeded its widespread adoption. To this end, we look at trading-off STT-RAM's non-volatility property (data-retention-time) to overcome these problems. We formulate the relationship between retention-time and write-latency, and find optimal retention-time for architecting an efficient cache hierarchy using STT-RAM. Our results show that, compared to SRAM-based design, our proposal can improve performance and energy consumption by 18% and 60%, respectively.