A Survey on Phase Change Memory-Aware Cache Management

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PCM (phase change memory) has been regarded as one of the most promising NVRAM. Due to its excellent features including high access speed, good scalability, byte addressability, and low idle power, PCM is expected to be an alternative to DRAM or flash memory in the future. So far, many different kinds of architecture have been proposed to merge PCM into the memory hierarchy of computer systems. For PCM-based computer systems, considering that PCM has various properties differing with DRAM and conventional storage media, traditional cache management policies based on DRAM and disks have to be re-designed. In this paper, we present a survey on the cache management policies for PCM-based systems that employ PCM as main memory or as secondary storage. Specially, for different PCM-based architectures, we explain how PCM-aware cache management policies exploit PCM’s advantages and overcome PCM’s drawbacks like asymmetric read/write latencies.