A Light-Weighted Software-Controlled Cache for PCM-based Main Memory Systems
Hung-Sheng Chang, Yuan-Hao Chang, Tei‐Wei Kuo, Hsiang-Pang Li · International Conference on Computer Aided Design · 2015
The replacement of DRAM with non-volatile memory relies on solutions to resolve the wear leveling and slow write problems. Different from the past work in compiler-assisted optimization or joint DRAM-PCM management strategies, we explore a light-weighted software-controlled DRAM cache design for the non-volatile-memory-based main memory. The run-time overheads in the management of the DRAM cache is minimized by utilizing the information from a miss of the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) or the cache. Experiments were conducted based on a series of the well-known benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed design, for which the results are very encouraging.