Performance and Energy Efficiency Tradeoffs of Storage Class Memory
The traditional mobile consumer electronics such as media players and smart phones use two distinct memories SDRAM and Flash memory SDRAM is used as main memory since it has characteristic of byte unit random accessibility while Flash memory as secondary storage due to its characteristic of non volatility However the advent of Storage Class Memory (SCM) that supports both SDRAM and Flash memory characteristics gives an opportunity to design a new system configuration In this paper we explore four feasible system configurations namely RAM Flash RAM SCM SCM Flash and SCM Only Then using a real embedded system equipped with FeRAM a type of SCM we analyze the tradeoffs between performance and energy efficiency of each configuration Experimental results have shown that SCM has great potential to reduce energy consumption for all configurations while performance is highly application dependent and might be degraded on the SCM Flash and SCM Only configuration.
storage class memory new memory hierarchy performance energy consumption