This paper summarizes the idea of Tiered-Latency DRAM, which was published in HPCA 2013. The key goal of TL-DRAM is to provide low DRAM latency at low cost, a critical problem in modern memory systems. To this end, TL-DRAM introduces heterogeneity into the design of a DRAM subarray by segmenting the bitlines, thereby creating a low-latency, low-energy, low-capacity portion in the subarray (called the near segment), which is close to the sense amplifiers, and a high-latency, high-energy, high-capacity portion, which is farther away from the sense amplifiers. Thus, DRAM becomes heterogeneous with a small portion having lower latency and a large portion having higher latency. Various techniques can be employed to take advantage of the low-latency near segment and this new heterogeneous DRAM substrate, including hardware-based caching and software based caching and memory allocation of frequently used data in the near segment. Evaluations with simple such techniques show significant performance and energy-efficiency benefits.
@article{arxiv.1601.06903,
title = {Tiered-Latency DRAM (TL-DRAM)},
author = {Donghyuk Lee and Yoongu Kim and Vivek Seshadri and Jamie Liu and Lavanya Subramanian and Onur Mutlu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.06903},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
This is a summary of the original paper, entitled "Tiered-Latency DRAM: A Low Latency and Low Cost DRAM Architecture" which appears in HPCA 2013