A novel hybrid DRAM/STT-RAM last-level-cache architecture for performance, energy, and endurance enhancement

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Abstract

High-capacity L4 architectures as a last-level cache (LLC) have been recently introduced between L3-SRAM and off-chip memory. These LLC architectures have either employed DRAM or spin-transfer torque (STT-RAM) memory technologies. It is a known fact that DRAM LLCs feature a higher energy consumption, while STT-RAM LLCs feature a lower write endurance compared to their counterparts. This paper proposes an efficient hybrid DRAM/STT-RAM LLC architecture that exploits the best characteristics offered by individual memory technologies while mitigating their drawbacks. More precisely, we introduce a novel mechanism for the storage and management of the hybrid LLC tags and a proactive L3-SRAM writeback policy that combines multiple dirty blocks that are mapped to the same LLC row. Our hybrid architecture reduces the LLC interference by having less writeback accesses and row fetches. The endurance is improved by reducing the number of STT-RAM block writes. We show that our LLC architecture reduces the total number of STT-RAM block writes by 78% and improves the average performance by 13% compared to a recently proposed STT-RAM LLC. Compared to the state-of-the-art DRAM LLC, we report an average energy and performance improvement of 24% and 17.1%, respectively.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number8734763
Pages (from-to)2375-2386
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems
Volume27
Issue number10
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2019
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-5007-445X/work/141545535

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • Architecture, cache, memory, memory hierarchy

Library keywords