Skinflint DRAM System: Minimizing DRAM Chip Writes for Low Power

Abstract

DRAMs are one of the main players of computer system energy consumption due to their large capacities and frequent accesses. Consequently, many schemes have been proposed to reduce DRAM power/energy consumption. Some of them propose new DRAM system and chip organizations, which are effective in reducing power consumption but intrusive. In contrast, we minimize DRAM write accesses at chip level with minimal modification of the conventional DRAM system organization and small addition to caches. When all data going to the same DRAM chips are not modified, the chips are not accessed. Consequently, chips are accessed selectively in our scheme while all chips are accessed simultaneously in the conventional DRAM system. Our chip-based selective DRAM write scheme is shown to reduce DRAM power and energy consumptions by 17% and 14%, respectively, on average. The overheads of our scheme are small in terms of performance, area, and energy consumption.