Tutorial: Basics of Memory Tiers in Compute Systems
Rob Sprinkle · 2016
As Moore?s Law challenges have slowed CPU lithography-based performance scaling, potential changes in the memory subsystem stand out as one area where continued system-level performance improvements can be realized. As part of this tutorial, a server Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model will be presented that can apply from stand-alone servers to datacenters. This model will be used to evaluate the wider impact of performance and behavioral characteristics of various tiers of the memory hierarchy - from SRAM cache to new tiers of emerging memory. Typical datacenter workloads and how the memory tiers are utilized will also be presented.