A Survey of Non-Volatile Main Memory Technologies: State-of-the-Arts, Practices, and Future Directions

Non-Volatile Main Memories (NVMMs) have recently emerged as a promising technology for future memory systems. Generally, NVMMs have many desirable properties such as high density, byte-addressability, non-volatility, low cost, and energy efficiency, at the expense of high write latency, high write power consumption, and limited write endurance. NVMMs have become a competitive alternative of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), and will fundamentally change the landscape of memory systems. They bring many research opportunities as well as challenges on system architectural designs, memory management in operating systems (OSes), and programming models for hybrid memory systems. In this article, we first revisit the landscape of emerging NVMM technologies, and then survey the state-of-the-art studies of NVMM technologies. We classify those studies with a taxonomy according to different dimensions such as memory architectures, data persistence, performance improvement, energy saving, and wear leveling. Second, to demonstrate the best practices in building NVMM systems, we introduce our recent work of hybrid memory system designs from the dimensions of architectures, systems, and applications. At last, we present our vision of future research directions of NVMMs and shed some light on design challenges and opportunities.