A novel memory subsystem called Memory Expansion Technology (MXT) has been built for fast
hardware compression of main memory contents. This allows a memory expansion to present a "real"
memory larger than the physically available memory. This paper provides an overview of the memory
compression architecture, the OS support and an analysis of the performance impact of memory
compression while running multiple benchmarks. Results show that the hardware compression of main
memory has a negligible penalty compared to an uncompressed memory, and for memory starved
applications it increases performance significantly. We also show that applications’ memory contents can be compressed usually by a factor of two.
By: Dan E. Poff, Mohammad Banikazemi, Robert A. Saccone, Hubertus Franke, Bulent Abali, T. Basil Smith
Published in: RC22107 in 2001
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