Exploiting Non-Volatility for Information Processing.

The emergence of non-volatile (NV) technologies provides an opportunity to overcome limitations of CMOS (e.g., the growth of leakage power), while simultaneously providing a degree of non-volatility to the processor. Spintronic NV technologies are of particular interest due to their high integration density, low device count, radiation hardness, and non-volatility when compared to CMOS. Quantifying the impact of spintronic NV technologies at the architecture/application levels introduces a unique challenge as the granularity of technology integration can vary significantly (i.e., from heterogeneous architectures with NV cache/memory and CMOS-based logic, to completely NV architectures). In this work, we explore three classes of NV processors (NVPs) and define metrics for quantifying their respective energy savings. As case studies, we evaluate the impact of NV technologies for both an energy harvesting non-pipelined processor and a general purpose processor executing scientific applications under varying degrees of parallelism.