Patent ID: 11868271
Assignee: ZEROPOINT TECHNOLOGIES AB
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G

Claim 20:
21. A sector-based memory compression system, comprising a compressed computer memory;
a device for accessing compressed computer memory residing in physical computer memory, wherein the device for accessing compressed computer memory comprises:
an address translation unit;
a compressed address calculator unit;
a sector request unit;
a selector unit;
a sector merge unit;
a decompressor,
a compressor,
wherein compressed memory blocks in said compressed computer memory are represented as sectors, and wherein all sectors contain a fixed number of compressed memory blocks such as cache lines, have a fixed logical size in the form of the fixed number of compressed memory blocks, and have varying physical sizes in the form of the total size of data stored in the respective compressed memory blocks,
the address translation unit, the compressed address calculator unit and the sector request unit being configured, in combination, for converting a physical memory access request to a sector-based compressed memory request, wherein:
a sector id is extracted automatically using an address of said physical memory access request,
said sector id is used to determine from sector-based translation metadata the location of a sector in the compressed computer memory,
a compressed address and size of the determined sector are calculated, and
based on the compressed address and size, a sector request is made to the compressed computer memory;
the decompressor and the selector unit being configured, in combination, when said physical memory access request is a read request, for operating on compressed sector data as retrieved from the compressed computer memory in response to the sector request to obtain read request response data from said compressed sector data using the address and a size of said physical memory access request, and to return the obtained read request response data in decompressed form to a source of said physical memory access request being a read request; and
the sector merge unit and the compressor being configured, in combination, when said physical memory access request is a write request, for merging data of said compressed sector data as retrieved from the compressed computer memory in response to the sector request with data in said physical memory access request to obtain sector-based write request data using the address and size of said physical memory access request being a write request, and to store the obtained sector-based write request data as compressed sector data in the compressed computer memory; and
a free memory management device.