Microelectronic Systems Design Research Group Contributes DRAM Power Model to gem5 Simulator

Since DRAMs contribute significantly to the power consumption of todays systems, there is a need for accurate power modelling. One of the most common ways in research and industry is using Micron’s power calculator, which estimates the power from data sheet and workload specifications. However, this model is not accurate enough, as it assumes certain workload characteristics. To overcome this limitation, we focus on an improved version, called DRAMPower which uses the actual timings instead of the minimal timings from datasheets.

DRAMPower is an open source tool for fast and accurate DRAM power and energy estimation for DDR2/DDR3/DDR4, LPDDR/LPDDR2/LPDDR3 and Wide IO DRAM memories based on JEDEC standards. The tool is based on the DRAM power model developed jointly by the Computer Engineering Research Group at TU Delft and the Electronic Systems Group at TU Eindhoven and the Microelectronic System Design Research Group at TU Kaiserslautern.

We modified DRAMPower that it can be used as a library, and integrated it in the widely used gem5 simulator to calculate the power consumption online during the simulation.

More information: www.uni-kl.de/3d-dram