1. [Publications](/publications)
2. Architecting an Energy-Efficient DRAM System for GPUs
 
 # Architecting an Energy-Efficient DRAM System for GPUs

  ![](/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/publications/subchannels_1.jpg?itok=51VZjdFh)

 This paper proposes an energy-efficient, high-throughput DRAM architecture for GPUs and throughput processors. In these systems, requests from thousands of concurrent threads compete for a limited number of DRAM row buffers. As a result, only a fraction of the data fetched into a row buffer is used, leading to significant energy overheads. Our proposed DRAM architecture exploits the hierarchical organization of a DRAM bank to reduce the minimum row activation granularity. To avoid significant incremental area with this approach, we must partition the DRAM datapath into a number of semi-independent subchannels. These narrow subchannels increase data toggling energy which we mitigate using a static data reordering scheme designed to lower the toggle rate. This design has 35% lower energy consumption than a die-stacked DRAM with 2.6% area overhead. The resulting architecture, when augmented with an improved memory access protocol, can support parallel operations across the semi-independent subchannels, thereby improving system performance by 13% on average for a range of workloads.



 ## Authors



[Niladrish Chatterjee](/person/niladrish-chatterjee)

[Mike O'Connor](/person/mike-o-connor)

[Donghyuk Lee](/person/donghyuk-lee)

Daniel Johnson (NVIDIA)

Minsoo Rhu (NVIDIA)

[Steve Keckler](/person/stephen-keckler)

[William Dally](/person/william-dally)

 

 

 ## Publication Date



Monday, February 6, 2017

 

 ## Published in



[International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7920815/)

 

 ## Research Area



[Computer Architecture](/research-area/computer-architecture)

 

 

 ## External Links



[IEEE Digital Library](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7920815/)

 

 

 ## Uploaded Files



[Published manuscript](https://d1qx31qr3h6wln.cloudfront.net/publications/HPCA_2017_Subchannels.pdf "Open file in new window")2.04 MB

 

 

 ## Copyright



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