Managed-Retention Memory: A New Class of Memory for the AI Era

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Legtchenko, Sergey, Stefanovici, Ioan, Black, Richard, Rowstron, Antony, Liu, Junyi, Costa, Paolo, Canakci, Burcu, Narayanan, Dushyanth, Wu, Xingbo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Legtchenko, Sergey
Stefanovici, Ioan
Black, Richard
Rowstron, Antony
Liu, Junyi
Costa, Paolo
Canakci, Burcu
Narayanan, Dushyanth
Wu, Xingbo
author_facet Legtchenko, Sergey
Stefanovici, Ioan
Black, Richard
Rowstron, Antony
Liu, Junyi
Costa, Paolo
Canakci, Burcu
Narayanan, Dushyanth
Wu, Xingbo
contents AI clusters today are one of the major uses of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). However, HBM is suboptimal for AI workloads for several reasons. Analysis shows HBM is overprovisioned on write performance, but underprovisioned on density and read bandwidth, and also has significant energy per bit overheads. It is also expensive, with lower yield than DRAM due to manufacturing complexity. We propose a new memory class: Managed-Retention Memory (MRM), which is more optimized to store key data structures for AI inference workloads. We believe that MRM may finally provide a path to viability for technologies that were originally proposed to support Storage Class Memory (SCM). These technologies traditionally offered long-term persistence (10+ years) but provided poor IO performance and/or endurance. MRM makes different trade-offs, and by understanding the workload IO patterns, MRM foregoes long-term data retention and write performance for better potential performance on the metrics important for these workloads.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09605
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Managed-Retention Memory: A New Class of Memory for the AI Era
Legtchenko, Sergey
Stefanovici, Ioan
Black, Richard
Rowstron, Antony
Liu, Junyi
Costa, Paolo
Canakci, Burcu
Narayanan, Dushyanth
Wu, Xingbo
Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Emerging Technologies
AI clusters today are one of the major uses of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). However, HBM is suboptimal for AI workloads for several reasons. Analysis shows HBM is overprovisioned on write performance, but underprovisioned on density and read bandwidth, and also has significant energy per bit overheads. It is also expensive, with lower yield than DRAM due to manufacturing complexity. We propose a new memory class: Managed-Retention Memory (MRM), which is more optimized to store key data structures for AI inference workloads. We believe that MRM may finally provide a path to viability for technologies that were originally proposed to support Storage Class Memory (SCM). These technologies traditionally offered long-term persistence (10+ years) but provided poor IO performance and/or endurance. MRM makes different trade-offs, and by understanding the workload IO patterns, MRM foregoes long-term data retention and write performance for better potential performance on the metrics important for these workloads.
title Managed-Retention Memory: A New Class of Memory for the AI Era
topic Hardware Architecture
Artificial Intelligence
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09605