Efficiency Metrics and Bandwidth – A Memory Perspective

The race for increasing computing performance implied a dramatic increase in power which represents the main wall for further increase in computing. The “multi-core revolution” has shown a way out. Thus, today’s state-of-the-art architectures in embedded computing are based on heterogeneous multi-core architectures with application specific optimized accelerators. Unfortunately the immense computing power of such multi-core architectures brings as negative effect an increased demand on bandwidth and memory, denoted as bandwidth and memory walls. In this talk we will discuss two topics strongly related to the memory and bandwidth wall. First, the impact of memories and data transfers on metrics to compare different algorithms and implementations in the context of wireless baseband processing architectures. Second, the design space and potential of 3D DRAM architectures and multi-channel DRAM controllers.