Abstract:

We present a novel dynamic SDRAM page policy based on prediction mechanism and advance information. The policy makes full use of the addresses of memory accesses to accurately determine whether the next memory access is a page hit or not. If there is not a pending memory access, the policy predicts whether a page hit happens or not according to history records. Theoretical analysis shows that the policy can be easily implemented at low hardware cost. Experimental results confirm that all the three main categories of dynamic page policies based on advance information achieve the desired memory bandwidth. Under the best circumstances, the actual memory bandwidth is improved by 42%. Among the three policies, the policy based on both prediction mechanism and advance information is the best.

Key words: SDRAM;memory controller;open page policy;close page policy;dynamic page policy