Designing Efficient Heterogeneous Memory Architectures

The authors' model of energy, bandwidth, and latency for DRAM technologies enables exploration of memory hierarchies that combine heterogeneous memory technologies with different attributes. Analysis shows that the gap between on- and off-package DRAM technologies is narrower than that found between cache layers in traditional memory hierarchies. Thus, heterogeneous memory caches must achieve high hit rates or risk degrading both system energy and bandwidth efficiency.