Synonyms
Definition
The memory wall describes implications of the processor/memory performance gap that has grown steadily over the last several decades. If memory latency and bandwidth become insufficient to provide processors with enough instructions and data to continue computation, processors will effectively always be stalled waiting on memory. The trend of placing more and more cores on chip exacerbates the situation, since each core enjoys a relatively narrower channel to shared memory resources. The problem is particularly acute in highly parallel systems, but occurs in platforms ranging from embedded systems to supercomputers, and is not limited to multiprocessors.
Discussion
Introduction
The term memory wall was coined in a short, controversial note that William A. Wulf and Sally A. McKee published in a 1995 issue of the ACM SIGArch Computer Architecture News (“Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious” [11]). At the time, most computer...
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McKee, S.A., Wisniewski, R.W. (2011). Memory Wall. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_234
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_234
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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