A novel hardware support for heterogeneous multi-core memory system

- Support for both static and dynamic data-structures and memory access patterns.
- Specialized scratchpad memory is integrated to map complex access patterns.
- The data manager accesses, reuses and feeds complex patterns to the processing core.
- Complex patterns are managed at run-time, without the support of a master core.
- Can be integrated with soft/hard soft processor core.
- Support trace driven simulation and FPGA based real prototyping environment.

Memory technology is one of the cornerstones of heterogeneous multi-core system efficiency. Many memory techniques are developed to give good performance within the lowest possible energy budget. These technologies open new opportunities for the memory system architecture that serves as the primary means for data storage and data sharing between multiple heterogeneous cores. In this paper, we study existing state of the art memories, discuss a conventional memory system and propose a novel hardware mechanism for heterogeneous multi-core memory system called Pattern Aware Memory System (PAMS). The PAMS supports static and dynamic data structures using descriptors and specialized scratchpad memory. In order to prove the proposed memory system, we implemented and tested it on real-prototype and simulator environments. The benchmarking results on real-prototype hardware show that PAMS achieves a maximum speedup of 12.83x and 1.23x for static and dynamic data structures respectively. When compared to the Baseline System, the PAMS consumes up to 4.8 times less program memory for static and dynamic data structures respectively. The PAMS consumes 4.6% and 1.6 times less dynamic power and energy respectively. The results of simulator environment show that the PAMS transfers data-structures up to 5.12x faster than the baseline system.