CRAM: Efficient Hardware-Based Memory Compression for Bandwidth Enhancement

Abstract

This paper investigates hardware-based memory compression designs to increase the memory bandwidth. When lines are compressible, the hardware can store multiple lines in a single memory location, and retrieve all these lines in a single access, thereby increasing the effective memory bandwidth. However, relocating and packing multiple lines together depending on the compressibility causes a line to have multiple possible locations. Therefore, memory compression designs typically require metadata to specify the compressibility of the line. Unfortunately, even in the presence of dedicated metadata caches, maintaining and accessing this metadata incurs significant bandwidth overheads and can degrade performance by as much as 40%. Ideally, we want to implement memory compression while eliminating the bandwidth overheads of metadata accesses. This paper proposes CRAM, a bandwidth-efficient design for memory compression that is entirely hardware based and does not require any OS support or changes to the memory modules or interfaces. CRAM uses a novel implicit-metadata mechanism, whereby the compressibility of the line can be determined by scanning the line for a special marker word, eliminating the overheads of metadata access. CRAM is equipped with a low-cost Line Location Predictor (LLP) that can determine the location of the line with 98% accuracy. Furthermore, we also develop a scheme that can dynamically enable or disable compression based on the bandwidth cost of storing compressed lines and the bandwidth benefits of obtaining compressed lines, ensuring no degradation for workloads that do not benefit from compression. Our evaluations, over a diverse set of 27 workloads, show that CRAM provides a speedup of up to 73% (average 6%) without causing slowdown for any of the workloads, and consuming a storage overhead of less than 300 bytes at the memory controller.