Characterizing Memory References for Smartphone Applications and Its Implications

Abstract

As smartphones support a variety of applications and their memory demand keeps increasing, the design of an efficient memory management policy is becoming increasingly important. Meanwhile, as nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies such as PCM and STT-MRAM have emerged as new memory media of smartphones, characterizing memory references for NVM-based smartphone memory systems is needed. For the deep understanding of memory access features in smartphones, this paper performs comprehensive analysis of memory references for various smartphone applications. We first analyze the temporal locality and frequency of memory reference behaviors to quantify the effects of the two properties with respect to the re-reference likelihood of pages. We also analyze the skewed popularity of memory references and model it as a Zipf-like distribution. We expect that the result of this study will be a good guidance to design an efficient memory management policy for future smartphones.