An Energy-Efficient Reliable Heterogeneous Uncore Architecture for Future 3D Chip-Multiprocessors

Uncore components such as cache hierarchy and on-chip interconnects consume a significant portion of overall energy consumption in emerging embedded processors. In Nanoscale technologies, static power consumption due to leakage current has become a serious issue in the design of SRAM-based on-chip cache memories and interconnections. To address this issue, non-volatile memory technologies such as STT-RAMs have been proposed as a replacement for SRAM cells due to their near-zero static power and high memory density. Nonetheless, STT-RAMs suffer from some failures such as read-disturb and limited endurance as well as high switching energy. One effective way to decrease the STTRAMs’ switching energy is to reduce their retention time; however, reducing the retention time has a negative impact on the reliability of STT-RAM cells. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous last level cache (LLC) architecture for 3D embedded chip-multiprocessors (3D eCMPs) which employs two types of STT-RAM memory banks with rete...