Dynamic Power Management of Off-Chip Links for Hybrid Memory Cubes
Junwhan Ahn, Sungjoo Yoo, Ki‐Young Choi · 2014
The Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) is a 3D-stacked DRAM architecture designed for substantially improved memory bandwidth. In particular, its I/O interface achieves up to 320 GB/s of external bandwidth through high-speed serial links. However, it comes at a cost of large static power of off-chip links, which dominates total power consumption of HMCs. Therefore, we propose an adaptive mechanism to partially disable off-chip links of HMCs with a minimal performance impact. We also present two-level prefetching with in-HMC prefetch buffers to further improve its efficiency in the presence of prefetching. Evaluations show that our scheme reduces energy consumption of HMCs by 51% on average.