Exploring memory energy optimizations in smartphones

Recent development of sophisticated smartphones has made them indispensable part of our everyday life. However, advances in battery technology cannot keep up with the demand for longer battery life. Subsequently, energy efficiency has become one of the most important factors in designing smartphones. Multitasking and better multimedia features in the mobile applications continuously push memory requirements further, making energy optimizations for memory critical. Mobile RAM is already optimized for energy efficiency at the hardware level. It also provides power state switching interfaces to the operating system which enables the OS level energy optimizations. Many RAM optimizations have been explored for computer systems and in this paper we explore their applicability to smartphone hardware. In addition, we apply those optimizations to the newly emerging Phase Change Memory and study their energy efficiency and performance. Finally, we propose a hybrid approach to take the advantage of both Mobile RAM and Phase Change Memory. Results show that our hybrid mechanism can save more than 98% of memory energy as compared to the standard smartphone system with negligible impact on user experience.