research-article

Omitting Refresh: A Case Study for Commodity and Wide I/O DRAMs

Authors:

Deepak M. Mathew,

Matthias Herrmann,

Christian Brugger,

Christian Weis, and

Norbert WehnAuthors Info & Claims

MEMSYS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Memory Systems

October 2015

Pages 85 - 91

https://doi.org/10.1145/2818950.2818964

Published: 05 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Dynamic Random Access Memories (DRAM) have a big impact on performance and contribute significantly to the total power consumption in systems ranging from mobile devices to servers. Up to half of the power consumption of future high density DRAM devices will be caused by refresh commands. Moreover, not only the refresh rate does depend on the device capacity, but it strongly depends on the temperature as well. In case of 3D integration of MPSoCs with Wide I/O DRAMs the power density and thermal dissipation are increased dramatically. Hence, in 3D-DRAM even more DRAM refresh operations are required. To master these challenges, clever DRAM refresh strategies are mandatory either on hardware or on software level using new or already available infrastructures and implementations, such as Partial Array Self Refresh (PASR) or Temperature Compensated Self Refresh (TCSR).

In this paper, we show that for dedicated applications refresh can be disabled completely without or with negligible impact on the application performance. This is possible if it is assured that either the lifetime of the data is shorter than the currently required DRAM refresh period or if the application can tolerate bit errors to some degree in a given time window.

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Omitting Refresh: A Case Study for Commodity and Wide I/O DRAMs

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MEMSYS '15: Proceedings of the 2015 International Symposium on Memory Systems

October 2015

278 pages

ISBN:9781450336048

DOI:10.1145/2818950

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 October 2015

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MEMSYS '15: International Symposium on Memory Systems

October 5 - 8, 2015

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