Low Power Main Memory Configuration and Tasks Allocation

Modern Rambus DRAM technologies offer power management features for energy consumption optimization. It consists in multi-banking the memory addressing space instead of considering a monolithic module. The main advantage of this approach is the capability to set banks in low power modes when they are not accessed, such that only the accessed bank is maintained in active mode. In this paper we investigate how this power management capability can be handled for real-time and multi-tasking applications. Based on the application scheduler, the objective is to find an efficient allocation of application's tasks to memory banks as well as the corresponding memory configuration that lessen the energy consumption. Experiments on signal processing and multimedia applications show the effectiveness of this approach and the large energy savings.