Date 16th Dec 2022
Using data compression methods in the memory hierarchy can improve the efficiency of memory systems by enabling higher effective cache capacity, more effective use of available memory bandwidth and by enabling higher effective main memory capacity. This can lead to higher substantially higher performance and lower power consumption. However, to enable these values requires highly effective compression algorithms that can be implemented with low latency and high throughput. Research at Chalmers University of Technology and at ZeroPoint Technologies, a fabless startup company, has yielded many new families of compression methods that are now being commercially deployed. This talk will present the major insights of more than a decade of research on memory compression methods for the memory hierarchy. The talk covers value-aware and statistical compression caches, compression algorithms that are tuned to the data at hand through data analysis using new clustering algorithms to allow for substantially higher memory bandwidth.
