Energy-aware writes to non-volatile main memory

Abstract

Scalability challenges of DRAM technology call for advances in emerging memory technologies, among which Phase Change Memory (PCM) has received considerable attention due to its non-volatility, storage density and capacity advantages. The drawbacks of PCM include limited write endurance and high power consumption for write operations (upto 10x in comparison to read operations). In this paper, we investigate new techniques that would perform writes to PCM with energy awareness. Our results show that we can minimize the write energy consumption by up to 8.1x by simply converting PCM native writes to read-before-write, and upto an additional 22.9% via intelligent out-of-position updates.