Memory access latency has significant impact on application performance. Unfortunately, the random access latency of DRAM has been scaling relatively slowly, and often directly affects the critical path of execution, especially for applications with insufficient locality or memory-level parallelism. The existing low-latency DRAM organizations either incur significant area overhead or burden the software stack with non-uniform access latency. This paper proposes SALAD, a new DRAM device architecture that provides s ymmetric a ccess l atency with a symmetric D RAM bank organizations. Since local banks have lower data transfer time due to their proximity to the I/O pads, SALAD applies high aspect-ratio (i.e., low-latency) mats only to remote banks to offset the difference in data transfer time, thus providing uniformly low access time (tAC) over the whole device. Our evaluation demonstrates that SALAD improves the IPC by 13 percent (10 percent) without any software modifications, while incurring only 6 percent (3 percent) area overhead.
