The Reach Profiler (REAPER)
Minesh Patel, Jeremie S. Kim, Onur Mutlu · 2017
Modern DRAM-based systems suffer from significant energy and latency penalties due to conservative DRAM refresh standards. Volatile DRAM cells can retain information across a wide distribution of times ranging from milliseconds to many minutes, but each cell is currently refreshed every 64ms to account for the extreme tail end of the retention time distribution, leading to a high refresh overhead. Due to poor DRAM technology scaling, this problem is expected to get worse in future device generations. Hence, the current approach of refreshing all cells with the worst-case refresh rate must be replaced with a more intelligent design.