On the Effective Bandwidth of Parallel Memories

The object of this paper is to bring together several models of interleaved or parallel memory systems and to expose some of the underlying assumptions about the address streams in each model. We derive the performance for each model, either analytically or by simulation, and discuss why it yields better or worse performance than other models (e.g., because of dependencies in the address stream or hardware queues, etc.). We also show that the performance of a properly designed system can be a linear rather than a square root function of the number of memories and processors.