Energy-Efficiency Exploration of Memory Hierarchy using NVMs for HEVC Motion Estimation
Wagner Penny, Jones Göebel, Douglas Corrêa, Anderson Martins, Gabriel Luca Nazar, Luciano Volcan Agostini, Daniel Palomino, Marcelo Porto, Bruno Zatt · 2019
Efficient video coding techniques applied by modern video encoders - e.g. the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) - enable the handling and sharing of digital videos content. The applied complex data-intensive algorithms, as the Motion Estimation (ME), pose severe constraints in terms of memory communication and energy consumption, especially for battery-powered devices. Thus, an evaluation using efficient memory hierarchies, exploring multiple cache configurations and the use of non-volatile memories (NVMs) as main memory, was performed. Our evaluation considered TZS algorithm, encoding FHD videos, under 32 different cache configurations, combined with three main memory technologies: DRAM, STTRAM, and ReRAM. The best cache configurations were selected in terms of lowest total energy consumption, moreover, different energy savings were achieved using non-volatile memories as main memory, varying from 33.4% to 57.6%, for STTRAM and ReRAM, respectively, with ReRAM presenting the best energy results and reducing the optimal cache size.