Energy management for multibanked memory architectures.

摘要

In recent years, energy consumption has become a first-level design goal for all kinds of computing systems, from embedded/mobile systems to high-end systems. Many hardware and software companies have recognized the importance of energy consumption optimization (due to battery lifetime, reliability and financial concerns) and have established it as one of their main design objectives. Taking this into account, in this thesis we propose a comprehensive set of techniques to reduce energy consumption of a computer system. More specifically, we focus on a multi-banked main memory. It has been shown that the main memory is an important contributor to the overall energy consumption and thus a first-rate target for energy optimization. The techniques that we present range from pure hardware-based techniques to techniques based on the Operating System (OS). These techniques prove to be very valuable in improving the energy consumption of the main memory system and applications with dissimilar characteristics can successfully utilize them.