Nonuniform banking for reducing memory energy consumption

Main memories can consume a large percentage of overall energy in many data-intensive embedded applications. The past research proposed and evaluated memory banking as a possible approach for reducing memory energy consumption. One of the common characteristics/assumptions made by most of the past work on banking is that all the banks are of the same size. While this makes the formulation of the problem easy, it also restricts the potential solution space. Motivated by this observation, this paper investigates the possibility of employing nonuniform bank sizes for reducing memory energy consumption. Specifically, it proposes an integer linear programming (ILP) based approach that returns the optimal nonuniform bank sizes and accompanying data-to-bank mapping. It also studies how data migration can further improve over nonuniform banking. We implemented our approach using an ILP tool and made extensive experiments. The results show that the proposed strategy brings important energy benefits over the uniform banking scheme, and data migration across banks tends to increase these savings.