Micron Technology, Inc.
Host-Assisted Memory-Side Prefetcher

Abstract:

Methods, apparatuses, and techniques related to a host-assisted memory-side prefetcher are described herein. In general, prefetchers monitor the pattern of memory-address requests by a host device and use the pattern information to determine or predict future memory-address requests and fetch data associated with those predicted requests into a faster memory. In many cases, prefetchers that can make predictions with high performance use appreciable processing and computing resources, power, and cooling. Generally, however, producing a prefetching configuration that the prefetcher uses involves more resources than making predictions. The described host-assisted memory-side prefetcher uses the greater computing resources of the host device to produce at least an updated prefetching configuration. The memory-side prefetcher uses the prefetching configuration to predict the data to prefetch into the faster memory, which allows a higher-performance prefetcher to be implemented in the memory device with a reduced resource burden on the memory device.