Why graphics programmers need to know about DRAM
Erik L. Brunvand, Niladrish Chatterjee, Daniel Kopta · 2014
• Just a quick overview of what DRAM is, how it works, and what you should know about it as a programmer. • A look at the circuits so you get some insight about why DRAM is so weird • A look at the DIMMs so you can see how that weirdness manifests in real memory sticks • A peek behind the scenes at the memory controller Welcome! This course is all about main memory behavior- DRAM in particular. You may not think that main memory performance is important- it’s caches that are really important, right? Of course caches are important. But, even if your cache hit rates are high, and you are more concerned about throughput than latency, main memory is still interesting.- For one thing, DRAM uses much more power than you probably think.- It’s also slower than you might think. So, small changes in the required bandwidth can have a large impact on your application’s speed and power performance. It turns out that DRAM is really complex to access, so if you don’t have at least a little understanding of what’s happening “under the hood”, you won’t know how to work with it.