The DIMM tree architecture: A high bandwidth and scalable memory system

  • Authors:

  • Kanit Therdsteerasukdi;Gyung-Su Byun;Jeremy Ir;Glenn Reinman;Jason Cong;M. F. Chang

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, USA;Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA;Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, USA;Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, USA;Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles, USA;Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

  • Venue:
  • ICCD '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 29th International Conference on Computer Design
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The demand for capacity and off-chip bandwidth to DRAM will continue to grow as we integrate more cores onto a die. However, as the data rate of DRAM has increased, the number of DIMMs supported on a multi-drop bus has decreased. Therefore, traditional memory systems are not sufficient to meet both these demands. We propose the DIMM tree architecture for better scalability by connecting the DIMMs as a tree. The DIMM tree architecture is able to grow the number of DIMMs exponentially with each level of latency in the tree. We also propose application of Multiband Radio Frequency Interconnect (MRF-I) to the DIMM tree architecture for even greater scalability and higher throughput. The DIMM tree architecture without MRF-I was able to scale up to 64 DIMMs with only an 8% degradation in throughput over an ideal system. The DIMM tree architecture with MRF-I was able to increase throughput by 68% (up to 200%) on a 64-DIMM system over a 4-DIMM system.