Exploring latency-power tradeoffs in deep nonvolatile memory hierarchies

To handle the demand for very large main memory, we are likely to use nonvolatile memory (NVM) as main memory. NVM main memory will have higher latency than DRAM. To cope with this, we advocate a less-deep cache hierarchy based on a large last-level, NVM cache. We develop a model that estimates average memory access time and power of a cache hierarchy. The model is based on captured application behavior, an analytical power and performance model, and circuit-level memory models such as CACTI and NVSim. We use the model to explore the cache hierarchy design space and present latency-power tradeoffs for memory intensive SPEC benchmarks and scientific applications. The results indicate that a flattened hierarchy lowers power and improves average memory access time.

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