Exploiting storage class memory to reduce energy consumption in mobile multimedia devices

Abstract

Storage Class Memory (SCM) provides a valuable opportunity to merge main memory and secondary storage since it is not only non-volatile but also randomly accessible in byte unit. In this paper, we investigate four system configurations employing SCM and Flash memory storage and evaluate how much energy can be saved from each of them. According to experimental results measured in a real system, the most expensive combination of SDRAM memory and SCM storage increases performance dramatically. Also, the configuration using SCM for both memory and data storage lowers energy consumption to roughly an eighth, but decreases performance of compute intensive jobs to half, compared with the conventional SDRAM memory and Flash memory storage configuration.