3D-Xpath: high-density managed DRAM architecture with cost-effective alternative paths for memory transactions

The advance of DRAM manufacturing technology slows down, whereas the density and performance needs of DRAM continue to increase. This desire has motivated the industry to explore emerging Non-Volatile Memory (e.g., 3D XPoint) and the high-density DRAM (e.g., Managed DRAM Solution). Since such memory technologies increase the density at the cost of longer latency, lower bandwidth, or both, it is essential to use them with fast memory (e.g., conventional DRAM) to which hot pages are transferred at runtime. Nonetheless, we observe that page transfers to fast memory often block memory channels from servicing memory requests from applications for a long period. This in turn significantly increases the high-percentile response time of latency-sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a high-density managed DRAM architecture, dubbed 3D-XPath for applications demanding both low latency and high capacity for memory. 3D-XPath DRAM stacks conventional DRAM dies with high-density DRAM dies explored in this paper and connects these DRAM dies with 3D-XPath. Especially, 3D-XPath allows unused memory channels to service memory requests from applications when primary channels supposed to handle the memory requests are blocked by page transfers at given moments, considerably increasing the high-percentile response time. This can also improve the throughput of applications frequently copying memory blocks between kernel and user memory spaces. Our evaluation shows that 3D-XPath DRAM decreases high-percentile response time of latency-sensitive applications by ~30% while improving the throughput of an I/O-intensive applications by ~39%, compared with DRAM without 3D-XPath.