Near-memory caching for improved energy consumption

Main memory has become one of the largest contributors to overall energy consumption and offers many opportunities for power/energy reduction. In this paper, we propose a power-aware cached-DRAM (PA-CDRAM) organization that integrates a moderately sized cache directly into a memory module. We use this near-memory cache to turn a memory bank off immediately after it is accessed to reduce power consumption. We modify the structure of cached DRAM (CDRAM) with the goal of reducing energy consumption while retaining the performance advantage for which CDRAM was originally proposed. We evaluate the approach using a cycle accurate processor and memory simulator. Our results show that PACDRAM achieves up to 84% (28% on average) improvement in the energy-delay product and up to 76% (19% on average) savings in energy when compared to a time-out power management technique.