NV-SP: A New High Performance and Low Energy NVM-Based Scratch Pad

Non-Volatile Memory technologies are rising as a candidate for a universal memory. NVMs offer solutions for the high power consumption that contemporary memory suffers from. Hence, we propose augmenting the traditional SRAM cache with an additional NVM device instead of entirely replacing SRAM with NVM. The L1 instruction-cache is augmented with a Non-Volatile Scratch-Pad, coined NV-SP, that stores instructions causing the highest number of misses. Experiments were evaluated for performance and energy of the SRAM I-cache and the NV-SP when implemented using Magnetic RAM and Phase-Changing RAM technologies. Results have shown that MRAM NV-SP had effectively improved the performance of the I-cache.