A generalized model for modern hierarchical memory system

Abstract

Memory system is critical to architecture design which can significantly impact application performance. Concurrent Average Memory Access Time (C-AMAT) is a model for analyzing and optimizing memory system performance using a recursive definition of the memory access latency along the memory hierarchy. The original C-AMAT model, however, does not provide the necessary granularity and flexibility for handling modern memory architectures with heterogeneous memory technologies and diverse system topology. We propose to augment C-AMAT to take into consideration the idiosyncrasies of individual cache/memory components as well as their topological arrangement in the memory architecture design. Through trace-based simulation, we validate the augmented model and examine the memory system performance with insight unavailable using the original C-AMAT model.

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