Phase-Change RAM-Based Main Memory Subsystem Design Targeted for Video Applications

Abstract

We present PRAM-based main memory subsystem design methods for video applications. Video applications including video codecs issue heavy write traffics to main memory, and emerging PRAM technology tends to suffer from the write endurance problem where the maximum number of writes is limited. To resolve this PRAM write endurance problem, we propose inter-block differential data encoding (IB) and inter-frame multiple experts (IF). We compared the number of bit updates with the existing data encoding methods. Experimental results show an average of 18.4% reduction in bit updates. Our work is expected to contribute to resolving the write-related limitations of PRAM, i.e., short lifetime, high power consumption and long latency, by reducing PRAM writes with negligible overhead.