Fast cacheline-based data replacement for hybrid DRAM and STT-MRAM main memory

Abstract

The development of DRAM cannot meet the low power requirement of IoT applications due to the high refresh power. As one of new non-volatile memory, STT-MRAM has extremely low static power, high read performance and high endurance. In this paper, we build a hybrid DRAM and STT-MRAM main memory to reduce energy. Considering STT-MRAM’s high write power and high write latency, we propose a fast cacheline-based data replacement to reduce write operations of STT-MRAM. The results show that the hybrid DRAM and STT-MRAM main memory can provide comparable performance to DRAM, with an average 32% reduction in main memory energy.