Monarch: A Durable Polymorphic Memory For Data Intensive Applications

TL;DR

Monarch introduces a reconfigurable 3D stacked resistive memory with a novel array that enhances bandwidth utilization and supports diverse application needs, outperforming traditional DRAM caches significantly.

Contribution

The paper presents Monarch, a durable, polymorphic memory architecture utilizing a novel XAM array for improved performance and versatility in data-intensive applications.

Findings

Monarch outperforms ideal DRAM caching by 1.21x on average.

Achieves up to 12x performance improvement in hash table and string matching workloads.

Demonstrates effective lifetime management of resistive memory stacks.

Abstract

3D die stacking has often been proposed to build large-scale DRAM-based caches. Unfortunately, the power and performance overheads of DRAM limit the efficiency of high-bandwidth memories. Also, DRAM is facing serious scalability challenges that make alternative technologies more appealing. This paper examines Monarch, a resistive 3D stacked memory based on a novel reconfigurable crosspoint array called XAM. The XAM array is capable of switching between random access and content-addressable modes, which enables Monarch (i) to better utilize the in-package bandwidth and (ii) to satisfy both the random access memory and associative search requirements of various applications. Moreover, the Monarch controller ensures a given target lifetime for the resistive stack. Our simulation results on a set of parallel memory-intensive applications indicate that Monarch outperforms an ideal DRAM caching by 1.21x on average. For in-memory hash table and string matching workloads, Monarch improves performance up to 12x over the conventional high bandwidth memories.