Towards Memory Specialization: A Case for Long-Term and Short-Term RAM
Peijing Li, Muhammad Shahir Rahman, Rachel Cleaveland, Sergey Legtchenko, Philip A. Levis, Ioan A. Stefanovici, Thierry Tambe, David L. Tennenhouse, Caroline Trippel, H.‐S. Philip Wong · 2025
Both SRAM and DRAM have stopped scaling: there is no technical roadmap to reduce their cost (per byte/GB). As a result, memory now dominates system cost. This paper argues for a paradigm shift from today's simple memory hierarchy toward specialized memory architectures that exploit application-specific access patterns. Rather than relying solely on traditional off-chip DRAM and on-chip SRAM, we envisage memory systems equipped with additional types of memory whose performance trade-offs benefit workloads through non-hierarchical optimization.