Main memory plays a critical role in a computer system's performance and energy efficiency. Three key parameters define a main memory system's efficiency: latency, bandwidth, and power. Current memory systems tries to balance all these three parameters to achieve reasonable efficiency for most programs. However, in a multi-core system, applications with various memory demands are simultaneously executed. This paper proposes a heterogeneous main memory with three different memory modules, where each module is heavily optimized for one the three parameters at the cost of compromising the other two. Based on the memory access characteristics of an application, the operating system allocates its pages in a memory module that satisfies its memory requirements. When compared to a homogeneous memory system, we demonstrate through cycle-accurate simulations that our design results in about 13.5% increase in system performance and a 20% improvement in memory power.

The sustained push toward smaller and smaller technology sizes has reached a point where device reliability has moved to the forefront of concerns for next-generation designs. Silicon failure mechanisms, such as transistor wearout and manufacturing defects, are a growing challenge that threatens the yield and product lifetime of future systems. In this paper we introduce the BulletProof pipeline, the first ultra low-cost mechanism to protect a microprocessor pipeline and on-chip memory system from silicon defects. To achieve this goal we combine area-frugal on-line testing techniques and system-level checkpointing to provide the same guarantees of reliability found in traditional solutions, but at much lower cost. Our approach utilizes a microarchitectural checkpointing mechanism which creates coarse-grained epochs of execution, during which distributed on-line built in self-test (BIST) mechanisms validate the integrity of the underlying hardware. In case a failure is detected, we rely on the natural redundancy of instructionlevel parallel processors to repair the system so that it can still operate in a degraded performance mode. Using detailed circuit-level and architectural simulation, we find that our approach provides very high coverage of silicon defects (89%) with little area cost (5.8%). In addition, when a defect occurs, the subsequent degraded mode of operation was found to have only moderate performance impacts, (from 4% to 18% slowdown).