In-memory databases dominate today’s data center workloads. The large memory footprints of these databases necessitate bigger server memory capacities. However, memory is the highest cost item in a data center server bill of materials, leading to higher server costs. New generations of multi-core processors are available to support the computing power needed. Besides the native DRAM memory channels, these processors support CXL interfaces to augment the memory capacity of the server using CXL Type-3 devices1 . CXL-based memory tiering can be an effective strategy for enhancing the memory-to-core ratio in the server. O/S or software-based tiering techniques have been introduced in recent years to support CXL-based memory tiering. The Intel® Flat Memory Mode (FMM) feature on the latest generation Intel® Xeon® 6 processors offers an innovative hardware-based technique to do the same. This paper focuses on Intel Flat Memory Mode as a hardware-based memory tiering technique and explores its performance for in-memory database management compared to O/S-based software techniques.
See White paper: The Advantages of Managing the CXL Memory Tier in Hardware.
