Tiêu đề Research Based Assessment ✅

Question 1: Investigating Memory Hierarchy in Mobile and Gaming Devices Modern smartphones and gaming consoles achieve impressive performance despite tight power and thermal constraints. A key reason is their carefully designed memory hierarchies, which balance speed, capacity, energy efficiency, and responsiveness. Choose a real-world platform – such as the Apple M1 SoC, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, or PlayStation 5 – and analyze how its memory system is structured to support high-performance workloads like gaming, multitasking, or video processing. For example, the Apple M1 integrates 128KB L1 caches, a 12-24 MB L2 cache, and up to 16GB of LPDDR4X DRAM delivering ~68 GB/s bandwidth – all within a unified memory architecture shared by CPU and GPU. The PlayStation 5 pairs 16GB of GDDR6 RAM (448 GB/s with a custom SSD capable of 5.5 GB/s throughput, streaming game assets in real time without preloading large datasets into DRAM. In your report: ● Describe the memory hierarchy of your selected device: registers, cache levels (with sizes and associativity if available), DRAM, and storage ● Explain how the architecture exploits locality principles – for example, through unified memory, fast cache access, or streaming from SSD ● Analyze tradeoffs in speed, latency, energy use, and die area among SRAM, DRAM, and NAND ● Consider whether the CPU and GPU share memory, and how cache coherence or bandwidth sharing is handled ● Support your points with real specifications and performance data from valid sources ● Finally, reflect on how memory design decisions affect the device’s responsiveness, energy efficiency, longevity, and potential environmental impact. Expected Outcome: ● Break down the memory hierarchy of a real system ● Apply concepts such as temporal/spatial locality, latency hierarchy, and cache trade-offs ● Use hardware specs to justify why certain memory types are used at different levels ● Think critically about how design choices affect both performance and long-term sustainability Suggested Readings: ● Patterson & Hennessy – Computer Organization and Design: RISC-V Edition [Chapter 5: Large and Fast - Exploiting Memory Hierarchy] ● Understanding the PS5's SSD, https://forums.anandtech.com/