CompressPoints: An Evaluation Methodology for Compressed Memory Systems

Current memory technology has hit a wall trying to scale to meet the increasing demands of modern client and datacenter systems. Data compression is a promising solution to this problem. Several compressed memory systems have been proposed in the past years  [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] . Unfortunately, a reasonable methodology to evaluate these systems is missing. In this paper, we identify the challenges for evaluating main memory compression. We propose an effective methodology to evaluate a compressed memory system by proposing mechanisms to: (i) incorporate correct virtual address translation, (ii) choose a region in the application that is representative of the compression ratio, in addition to regular metrics like IPC and cache hit rates, and (iii) choose a representative region for multi-core workloads, bringing down the correlation error from 12.8 to 3.8 percent.