eTag: Tag-Comparison in Memory to Achieve Direct Data Access based on eDRAM to Improve Energy Efficiency of DRAM Cache

Abstract

As 2.5D/3D die stacking technology emerges, stacked dynamic random access memory (DRAM) has been proposed as a cache due to its large capacity in order to bridge the latency gap between off-chip memory and SRAM caches. The main problems in utilizing a DRAM cache are the high tag storage overhead and the high lookup latency. To address these, we propose tags-in-eDRAM (embedded DRAM) due to its higher density and lower latency. This paper presents an eTag DRAM cache architecture that is composed of a novel tag-comparison-inmemory scheme to achieve direct data access. It eliminates access latency and comparison power by pushing tag-comparison into the sense amplifier. Furthermore, we propose a Merged Tag to enhance the eTag DRAM cache by comparing last-level cache tags and DRAM cache tags in parallel. Simulation results show that the eTag DRAM cache improves energy efficiency by 15.4% and 33.9% in 4-core and 8-core workloads, respectively. Additionally, the Merged Tag achieves 32.1% and 48.7% energy efficiency improvements in 4-core and 8-core workloads, respectively.