Proactive Dead Block Eviction for Reducing Write Latency in STT-MRAM Caches

Spin Transfer Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory (STT-MRAM) is a promising emerging memory technology for the on-chip caches. It has low read access time and low leakage power. Unfortunately, however, STT-MRAM suffers from its long write latency. This paper proposes a cache management mechanism that evicts the dead-blocks in advance to enable fast writes in the STT-MRAM-based caches. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism improves the performance by 7%, on average, compared to a baseline STT-MRAM cache.