Data replication in banked DRAMs for reducing energy consumption

Due to continuously increasing importance of memory systems, there have been a plethora of studies in the last decade to improve their performance and power consumption behavior. Banked memories have been the focus of several recent efforts that attempt to reduce power consumption and have been studied from both the hardware and software angles. One of the common assumptions made implicitly by all these prior efforts is that each data block has only a single copy in the banked memory system. This assumption, while preferable from the viewpoint of reducing the total memory footprint of program data, may cause unnecessary power consumption in the context of banked memories. Motivated by this observation, this paper proposes and evaluates a novel power management scheme for balanced memories based on data replication. The idea behind our approach is to use replication to prevent re-activating an otherwise idle memory bank. To achieve this, we implemented both a heuristic and an ILP based solution to the data placement and replication problem in a banked architecture.