SWA: A Novel Page Migration Scheme for Hybrid Memory System

Phase Change Memory (PCM) and DRAM based hybrid main memory has become an irresistible trend for future embedded systems. Previous researchers have focused on page migration strategies to achieve higher performance and energy efficiency. However, the ability of reducing PCM write operations could be further improved and most strategies do not consider how to reduce the DRAM energy consumption to further decrease the hybrid system energy. In this paper, we propose a novel hardware migration strategy named SWA, which innovatively DRAM self-migration to establish a fixed concentrate DRAM hot region to reduce the DRAM energy. Experiment results shows that the proposed technique is able to make most of the write hot pages absorbed by DRAM. Meanwhile, it largely decreases the PCM average access time and gets preferable energy consumption.