The memory challenge in computing systems: A survey

It is well known that DRAM memory performance cannot keep pace with the performance of today's multicore compute systems. In addition to the memory bandwidth problem, there is another major challenge, namely, the power/energy challenge. DRAMs are largely contributing to the overall power consumption. Thus, there is a need for power and bandwidth optimization of the DRAM memory subsystems. Moreover, new memory architectures are emerging like HBM, HMC and Wide I/O DRAMs to cope with the increasing bandwidth requirements. In this talk, we will give an overview on these new architectures and present various optimization techniques to optimize bandwidth and energy consumption in DRAM based memory systems.