Conservative row activation to improve memory power efficiency
Kun Fang, Zhichun Zhu · 2013
With the fast improvement on memory bandwidth and capacity, the memory power consumption has become a major contributor to the overall system power profile. Due to the increasing importance of memory-level parallelism at the multi-core era, most memory scheduling schemes eagerly exploit such parallelism to optimize performance. A common policy used by memory controllers today is, whenever possible, always trying to open memory banks for pending requests to maximize bank-level parallelism and throughput. However, we find that this is neither power optimal nor necessary for maintaining performance because usually many banks are open while waiting for the data bus ownership.