A Study of Leveraging Memory Level Parallelism for DRAM System on Multi-Core Architecture

DRAM system has been more and more critical on modern multi-core architecture where the Moore’s law has been made effect on increasing the number of cores integrated in a processor chip. The performance of DRAM system is usually measured in term of bandwidth and latency, which are regarded as inherently depending on Row Buffer Hit Rate (RBHR) according to previous studies. In this paper, we find that Memory Level Parallelism (MLP) exhibits a stronger correlation with the performance of DRAM system on multi-core/many-core architecture than RBHR, and promoting MLP significantly improves DRAM system performance. In order to exploit the MLP, we have evaluated various approaches including multi-bank, multi-row-buffers, multi-memory-controllers and the obsolete Virtual Channel Memory (VCM). The experimental results show that VCM is a better alternative to traditional DRAM chip on multicore/many-core architecture than the other three approaches because VCM has almost all the advantages of the others: 1) it can improve homogeneous workloads’ IPC by 2.21X on a 16-core system with 32 virtual channels due to leveraging unexploited MLP. 2) It can also promote Quality-of-Service (QoS) of DRAM system by removing unfairness while memory controllers serve memory requests. 3) It can save energy and has low area costs. Unfortunately, VCM, which was proposed in the late 1990s, faded away before multicore/manycore became dominated. Therefore, we suggest memory chip vendors reconsider the VCM technology for multi-core architecture.