Design and evaluation of dynamic access ordering hardware

Abstract

Memory bandwidth is rapidly becoming the limiting performance factor for many applications, particularly for streaming computations such as scientific vector processing or multimedia (de)compression. Although these computations lack the temporal locality of reference that makes caches effective, they have predictable access patterns. Since most modern DRAM components support modes that make it possible to perform some access sequences faster than others, the predictability of the stream accesses makes it possible to reorder them to get better memory performance. We describe and evaluate a Stream Memory Controller system that combines compile-time detection of streams with execution-time selection of the access order and issue. The technique is practical to implement, using existing compiler technology and requiring only a modest amount of special-purpose hardware. With our prototype system, we have observed performance improvements by factors of 13 over normal caching.