Evaluating STT-RAM as an energy-efficient main memory alternative

By Emre Kultursay, Mahmut Taylan Kandemir, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Onur Mutlu. IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, 2013

482 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we explore the possibility of using STT-RAM technology to completely replace DRAM in main memory. Our goal is to make STT-RAM performance comparable to DRAM while providing substantial power savings. Towards this goal, we first analyze the performance and energy of STT-RAM, and then identify key optimizations that can be employed to improve its characteristics. Specifically, using partial write and row buffer write bypass, we show that STT-RAM main memory performance and energy can be significantly improved. Our experiments indicate that an optimized, equal capacity STT-RAM main memory can provide performance comparable to DRAM main memory, with an average 60% reduction in main memory energy.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cdad12dcfd5441a64ca75352b626f037cba0e037

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Jeremie S. Kim
2. Onur Mutlu
3. Yoongu Kim
4. Saugata Ghose
5. Rachata Ausavarungnirun

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Jeremie S. Kim
2. Onur Mutlu
3. Yoongu Kim

In Hardware and Architecture

1. Jeremie S. Kim
2. Onur Mutlu
3. Yoongu Kim
4. Saugata Ghose
5. Mahmut Taylan Kandemir
6. Rachata Ausavarungnirun
7. Mor Harchol-Balter
8. Vivek Seshadri

Citations in the corpus

• Memory scaling: A systems architecture perspective (2013, methodology): “Second, some emerging resistive memory technologies, such as phase change memory (PCM) [66, 73, 38, 39, 65] or spintransfer torque magnetic memory (STT-MRAM) [14, 36] appear more scalable, have latency and bandwidth characteristics much closer to DRAM than flash memory and hard disks, and are non-vo”
• RowHammer: A Retrospective (2019, background): “[202], [204], [245], [253], [254], [259], STT-MRAM [61], [137], and RRAM/ReRAM/memristors [246] are likely to exhibit similar and perhaps even more exacerbated reliability”