Abstract
It has become increasingly challenging to respect Moore's well-known law in recent years. Energy efficiency and manufacturing constraints are among the main challenges to current integrated circuits today. The energy efficiency issue is mainly due to the high leakage current from the CMOS transistors that are used to build almost all logic devices. As a result, performance is limited to a few gigahertz due to high power dissipation. A significant proportion of total power is spent on memory systems due to the increasing trend of embedding volatile memory into systems-on-chip devices. New non-volatile memory technologies are one possible way to solve the energy efficiency issue. Among these technologies, magnetic memory is a promising candidate to replace current memories since it combines non-volatility, high density, low latency and low leakage. This paper describes an approach to obtain large, fine-grained exploration of how magnetic memory can be included in the memory hierarchy of processor-based systems by analyzing both performance and energy consumption.