Method and System for Memory Slewing on an Individual Memory Address Range (02-Feb-2010)

Method and System for Memory Slewing on an Individual Memory Address Range

Disclosed is a method and system for reducing the voltage and frequency of individual computer memory addresses which are not in use.

The energy consumed by computers with several memory modules can be significantly large. To address this, currently, the voltage and frequency of a complete physical memory module is reduced thereby reducing the energy consumed by the memory module. Since memory modules can be quite large, in some cases 1 gigabyte or larger, an operational system may consume only a small part of the available memory on any one memory module. However, because the frequency and voltage within these memory modules are tied to individual physical modules, the voltage and frequency cannot be scaled at an atomic level. Currently, systems operate at the maximum power and frequency required by the whole memory module thereby leading to inefficient use of power.

The method and system disclosed herein includes reducing the voltage and frequency of individual computer memory addresses which are not in use. This is achieved by adding individual voltage and frequency regulators to each memory chip. In this case, the reduction of the voltage and frequency occurs at a level that is much smaller than the physical memory capacity of the entire memory module.

Thus, the method and system disclosed herein allows for scaling of voltage and frequency at th...