Concurrent Average Memory Access Time

Concurrency is a common technique used in modern memory systems. However, the effectiveness of memory concurrency is application dependent. It varies largely from application to application and from implementation to implementation. Understanding and utilizing memory concurrency is a vital and timely task for data intensive applications. Traditional memory performance metrics, such as Average Memory Access Time (AMAT), are designed for sequential data accesses, and have inherent limitations in characterizing concurrency. In this study, we propose Concurrent Average Memory Access Time (C-AMAT) as an accurate metric for modern memory systems. C-AMAT has the ability to examine the impact of concurrent memory behavior at both the component and system level of modern memory systems. It is a good guide for design choices, while other conventional memory metrics often mislead in measurement when concurrency is present. Keywords Memory concurrency; memory metric; memory performance measurement 1