Reducing Memory System Energy in Data Intensive Computations by Software-Controlled On-Chip Memory

In recent computer systems, a large portion of energy is consumed by on-chip cache accesses and data movement between cache and off-chip main memory. Reducing these memory system energy is indispensable for future microprocessors because power and thermal issues certainly become a key factor of limiting processor performance. In this paper, we discuss and evaluate how our architecture called SCIMA contributes to energy saving. SCIMA integrates software-controllable memory (SCM) into processor chip. SCIMA can save total memory system energy by using SCM under the support of compiler. The evaluation results reveal that SCIMA can reduce 5%-50% of memory system energy and is still faster than conventional cache based architecture.