A permutation-based page interleaving scheme to reduce row-buffer conflicts and exploit data locality

DRAM row-buffer conflicts occur when a sequence of requests on different rows goes to the same memory bank, causing much higher memory access latency than requests to the same row or to different banks. We analyze the sources of row-buffer conflicts in the context of superscalar processors, and propose a permutation based page interleaving scheme to reduce row-buffer conflicts and to exploit data access locality in the row-buffer. Compared with several existing schemes, we show that the permutation based scheme dramatically increases the hit rates on DRAM row-buffers and reduces memory stall time of the SPEC95 and TPC-C workloads. The memory stall times of the workloads are reduced up to 68% and 50%, compared with the conventional cache line and page interleaving schemes, respectively.