Architectural design for next generation heterogeneous memory systems

New enterprise workloads requiring fast, reliable access to increasing amounts of data have pushed today's memory systems to power and capacity limits while creating bottlenecks as they ensure transactions are persistently tracked for reliability. New storage class memory technologies (such as phase change memory) have the potential to offer high capacity within latency and bandwidth ranges acceptable for a computer memory system and persistence which may help ease the system-level burden of balancing performance and reliability. This paper describes architectural options for addressing the challenges of future, heterogeneous memory systems as well as the attributes required of the next generation memory devices. © 2010 IEEE.