{"id":158329,"date":"2009-10-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/flicker-saving-refresh-power-in-mobile-devices-through-critical-data-partitioning\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T19:58:16","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T02:58:16","slug":"flicker-saving-refresh-power-in-mobile-devices-through-critical-data-partitioning","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/flicker-saving-refresh-power-in-mobile-devices-through-critical-data-partitioning\/","title":{"rendered":"Flicker: Saving Refresh-Power in Mobile Devices through Critical Data Partitioning"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Mobile devices are left in sleep mode for long periods of time. But even while in sleep mode, the contents of DRAM memory need to be periodically refreshed, which consumes a significant fraction of power in mobile devices. This paper introduces Flicker, an application-level technique to reduce refresh power in DRAM memories. Flicker enables developers to specify critical and non-critical data in programs and the runtime system allocates this data in separate parts of memory. The portion of memory containing critical data is refreshed at the regular refresh-rate, while the portion containing non-critical data is refreshed at substantially lower rates. This saves energy at the cost of a modest increase in data corruption in the non-critical data. Flicker thus explores a novel and interesting trade-off between energy consumption and hardware correctness. We show that many mobile applications are naturally tolerant to errors in the non-critical data, and in the vast majority of cases, the errors have little or no impact on the application\u2019s final outcome. We also find that Flicker can save between 20-25% of the power consumed by the memory subsystem in a mobile device, with negligible impact on application performance. Flicker is implemented almost entirely in software, and requires only modest changes to the application, operating system and hardware.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mobile devices are left in sleep mode for long periods of time. But even while in sleep mode, the contents of DRAM memory need to be periodically refreshed, which consumes a significant fraction of power in mobile devices. This paper introduces Flicker, an application-level technique to reduce refresh power in DRAM memories. Flicker enables developers 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