Simple but Effective Heterogeneous Main Memory with On-Chip Memory Controller Support
Xiangyu Dong, Yuan Xie, Naveen Muralimanohar, Norman Paul Jouppi · 2010
System-in-Package (SiP) and 3D integration are promising technologies to bring more memory onto a microprocessor package to mitigate the "memory wall" problem. In this paper, instead of using them to build caches, we study a heterogenous main memory using both on- and off-package memories providing both fast and high-bandwidth on-package accesses and expandable and low-cost commodity off-package memory capacity. We introduce another layer of address translation coupled with an on-chip memory controller that can dynamically migrate data between off-package and off-package memory either in hardware or with operating system assistance depending on the migration granularity. Our experimental results demonstrate that such design can achieve the average effectiveness of 83% of the ideal case where all memory can be placed in high-speed on-package memory for our simulated benchmarks.