Mellow Writes: Extending Lifetime in Resistive Memories through Selective Slow Write Backs

Emerging resistive memory technologies, such as PCRAM and ReRAM, have been proposed as promising replacements for DRAM-based main memory, due to their better scalability, low standby power, and non-volatility. However, limited write endurance is a major drawback for such resistive memory technologies. Wear leveling (balancing the distribution of writes) and wear limiting (reducing the number of writes) have been proposed to mitigate this disadvantage, but both techniques only manage a fixed budget of writes to a memory system rather than increase the number available. In this paper, we propose a new type of wear limiting technique, Mellow Writes, which reduces the wearout of individual writes rather than reducing the number of writes. Mellow Writes is based on the fact that slow writes performed with lower dissipated power can lead to longer endurance (and therefore longer lifetimes). For non-volatile memories, an N
¹
to N
³
times endurance can be achieved if the write operation is slowed down by N times. We present three microarchitectural mechanisms (BankAware Mellow Writes, Eager Mellow Writes, and Wear Quota) that selectively perform slow writes to increase memory lifetime while minimizing performance impact. Assuming a factor N
²
advantage in cell endurance for a factor N slower write, our best Mellow Writes mechanism can achieve 2.58× lifetime and 1.06× performance of the baseline system. In addition, its performance is almost the same as a system aggressively optimized for performance (at the expense of endurance). Finally, Wear Quota guarantees a minimal lifetime (e.g., 8 years) by forcing more slow writes in presence of heavy workloads. We also perform sensitivity analysis on the endurance advantage factor for slow writes, from N
¹
to N
³
, and find that our technique is still useful for factors as low as N
¹
.