Linearly Compressed Pages: A Low-Complexity, Low-Latency Main Memory Compression Framework

Data compression is a promising approach for meeting the increas-ing memory capacity demands expected in future systems. Un-fortunately, existing compression algorithms do not translate well when directly applied to main memory because they require the memory controller to perform non-trivial computation to locate a cache line within a compressed memory page, thereby increasing access latency and degrading system performance. Prior propos-als for addressing this performance degradation problem are either costly or energy inefficient. By leveraging the key insight that all cache lines within a page should be compressed to the same size, this paper proposes a new approach to main memory compression—Linearly Compressed Pages (LCP)—that avoids the performance degradation problem without requiring costly or energy-inefficient hardware. We sho