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DRAM power management and energy consumption: a critical assessment

Published: 31 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Energy efficiency is key in embedded systems design. Besides the CPU, DRAM has been identified as one of the main contributors to energy consumption in such devices. Modern DRAMs also offer low power states to adapt to varying workload and increase energy efficency. A number of studies have investigated different DRAM energy management strategies and propose a very aggressive use of low power states. The weakness of all of these studies is the underlying power model which does not account for transition overheads, and the lack of experimental evidence. We implemented a hardware controlled DRAM power management unit in an XScale based evaluation board and accurately measured the effects on runtime and power consumption. We observed that aggressive power management will even increase the average power consumption, due to the fact that all JEDEC compatible DRAMs execute a refresh when entering the power saving SREF-mode. This is not reflected in current, published power models. Thus, they dramatically overestimate the effectiveness of using low power states. We developed a new model for accurate timing and energy simulation of the observed effects. This model is integrated into the XEEMU XScale Energy Emulator.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SBCCI '09: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Symposium on Integrated Circuits and System Design: Chip on the Dunes
August 2009
325 pages
ISBN:9781605587059
DOI:10.1145/1601896
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 31 August 2009

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Author Tags

  1. SDRAM
  2. measurement
  3. modelling
  4. power management

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SBCCI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 50 of 119 submissions, 42%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 133 of 347 submissions, 38%

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  • (2020)The Dynamic Random Access Memory Challenge in Embedded Computing SystemsA Journey of Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems10.1007/978-3-030-47487-4_3(19-36)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2020
  • (2018)Optimization Techniques for 3D Graphics Deployment on Mobile Devices3D Research10.1007/s13319-015-0040-06:1(1-27)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2018
  • (2017)Integrating DRAM power-down modes in gem5 and quantifying their impactProceedings of the International Symposium on Memory Systems10.1145/3132402.3132444(86-95)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2017
  • (2016)Cycle-Accurate SDRAM Power ModelingMemory Controllers for Mixed-Time-Criticality Systems10.1007/978-3-319-32094-6_4(93-109)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2016
  • (2015)DRAMSys: A Flexible DRAM Subsystem Design Space Exploration FrameworkIPSJ Transactions on System LSI Design Methodology10.2197/ipsjtsldm.8.638(63-74)Online publication date: 2015
  • (2015)Design, implementation and analysis of a run-time configurable Memory Management Unit on FPGA2015 Nordic Circuits and Systems Conference (NORCAS): NORCHIP & International Symposium on System-on-Chip (SoC)10.1109/NORCHIP.2015.7364375(1-8)Online publication date: Oct-2015
  • (2015)Energy management for the homogeneous server clusters offering web servicesEnergy Efficiency10.1007/s12053-015-9412-99:5(1115-1144)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2015
  • (2013)System and circuit level power modeling of energy-efficient 3D-stacked wide I/O DRAMsProceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe10.5555/2485288.2485348(236-241)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2013
  • (2011)Dynamic computing resource adjustment for enhancing energy efficiency of cloud service data centers2011 IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration (SII)10.1109/SII.2011.6147613(1159-1164)Online publication date: Dec-2011
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