Evolutionary Design of the Memory Subsystem

This impact is estimated about 50% of the total energy consumption in the chip [1]. This places the memory subsystem as one of the most important sources to improve both performance and energy consumption. Concerns such as thermal issues or high energy consumption can cause a significant performance degradation, as well as irreversible damages to the devices therefore increasing the energy cost. Previous works have shown that saving energy in the memory subsystem can effectively control transistors aging effect and can significantly extend lifetime of the internal structures [2]. Technological changes combined with the development of communications have led to the great expansion of mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, etc. Mobile devices have evolved rapidly to adapt to the new requirements, giving support to multimedia applications. These devices are supplied with embedded systems, which are mainly battery-powered and usually have less computing resources than desktop systems. Additionally, multimedia applications are usually memory intensive, so they have high performance requirements which implies a high energy consumption. These features increase the pressure on the whole memory subsystem. Processor registers, smaller in size, work at the same speed than the processor and consume less energy compared with other levels of the memory subsystem.