Scaling the capacity of memory systems; evolution and key approaches
Kyriakos Paraskevas, Andrew Attwood, Mikel Luján, John Goodacre · Proceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems · 2019
The demand on memory capacity from applications has always challenged the available technologies. It is therefore important to understand that this demand and the consequential limitations in various aspects led to the appearance of new memory technologies and system designs. Fundamentally, not a single solution has managed to fully solve this memory capacity challenge. As argued in this survey paper, limitations by physical laws make the effort of expanding local off-chip memory impossible without adopting new approaches. The concept of Non Unified Memory Access (NUMA) architecture provides more system memory by using pools of processors, each with their own memories, to workaround the physical constraints on a single processor, but the additional system complexities and costs led to various scalability issues that deter any further system expansion using this method.