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arXiv · 2605.02371

Performance and Energy Benefits of MRDIMMs

Abstract

Multiplexed Rank DIMMs (MRDIMMs) have recently emerged as memory devices that enable higher bandwidth without increasing DRAM chip frequencies. This paper presents a detailed performance, power and energy evaluation of a production server with high-end MRDIMM main memory. The memory system upgrade from conventional registered DIMMs (RDIMMs) to MRDIMMs extends the bandwidth by 41% yielding 27-41% higher performance for bandwidth-bound workloads. Additionally, the latency improvement reaches hundreds of nanoseconds, benefiting a broad class of workloads sensitive to memory latency. At the same bandwidth utilization levels, RDIMMs and MRDIMMs exhibit similar power consumption. In the MRDIMM-extended bandwidth region, the performance improvements largely exceed the power increase, delivering up to 30% server energy savings for memory-bound workloads.

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Pau Díaz, Mariana Carmin, Pouya Esmaili-Dokht, Victor Xirau, Felippe Zacarias, Henrique Potter, Harald Servat, Miquel Moreto, Eduard Ayguadé, Petar Radojković. 2026-05-04. Performance and Energy Benefits of MRDIMMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02371

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