The increasing importance of energy e ciency has produced a m ultitude of hardware devices with various power management features. This paper investigates memory controller policies for manipulating DRAM power states in cache-based systems. We d e v elop an analytic model that approximates the idle time of DRAM chips using an exponential distribution, and validate our model against trace-driven simulations. Our results show that, for our benchmarks, the simple policy of immediately transitioning a DRAM chip to a lower power state when it becomes idle is superior to more sophisticated policies that try to predict DRAM chip idle time.
Fan et al. study memory controller policies considering DRAM power states for power saving REF .
Memory controller policies for DRAM power management
ISLPED '01
Chemistry Computer Science