The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 14, 2002
Filed:
Mar. 25, 1999
Tomas G. Rokicki, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
The present invention provides a method and an apparatus for addressing a main memory unit in a computer system which results in improved page hit rate and reduced memory latency by only keeping open some recently used pages and speculatively closing the rest of the pages in the main memory unit. In a computer system with 64 banks and 2 CPUs, only 8 banks may be kept open and the remaining 56 banks are kept closed. Keeping only 8 banks open will not reduce the page hit frequency significantly, but will allow most accesses that are not page hits to access banks that are already closed, so that they are not slowed down by open banks. Thus, the page hit rate is increased and the miss rate is reduced.