Evaluation of Existing Architectures in IRAM Systems

Computer memory systems are increasingly a bottleneck limiting application performance. IRAM architectures, which integrate a CPU with DRAM main memory on a single chip, promise to remove this limitation by providing tremendous main memory bandwidth and significant reductions in memory latency. To determine whether existing microarchitectures can tap the potential performance advantages of IRAM systems, we examined both execution time analyses of existing microprocessors and system simulation of hypothetical processors. Our results indicate that, for current benchmarks, existing architectures, whether simple, superscalar or out-of-order, are unable to exploit IRAM’s increased memory bandwidth and decreased memory latency to achieve significant performance benefits.

[1]  Chuan Yi Tang,et al.  A 2.|E|-Bit Distributed Algorithm for the Directed Euler Trail Problem , 1993, Inf. Process. Lett..

[2]  Dileep Bhandarkar,et al.  Performance characterization of the Pentium Pro processor , 1997, Proceedings Third International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture.

[3]  N. Kasai,et al.  A 30 ns 64 Mb DRAM with built-in self-test and repair function , 1992, 1992 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers.

[4]  K. Yelick,et al.  The Energy Efficiency Of Iram Architectures , 1997, Conference Proceedings. The 24th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

[5]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  Complete computer system simulation: the SimOS approach , 1995, IEEE Parallel Distributed Technol. Syst. Appl..

[6]  Christoforos E. Kozyrakis,et al.  A case for intelligent RAM , 1997, IEEE Micro.

[7]  David A. Patterson,et al.  Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach , 1969 .

[8]  T. Matano,et al.  A 2.5 ns clock access 250 MHz 256 Mb SDRAM with a synchronous mirror delay , 1996, 1996 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of TEchnical Papers, ISSCC.

[9]  Zarka Cvetanovic,et al.  Characterization of Alpha AXP performance using TP and SPEC workloads , 1994, Proceedings of 21 International Symposium on Computer Architecture.