Architecting a computer with a full optical RAM

On-chip photonics has gained attention in research for high-speed processor communication networks, and recent developments in optical fabrication techniques and data buffering has offered new opportunities for processor systems. In this work, we evaluate a processor with a full optical main memory system. We design it using recent optical devices that leverages the high-bandwidth optical capabilities to obtain low memory access latency, similar to those in state of the art L2 caches. This characteristic enables the possibility of eliminating the second level of caches, saving processor area. Experimental results show the average speedup is ×1.34 with SPEC2006 and ×1.80 with irregular applications.