A case study: Power measurement and optimization of DDR3 DIMM in servers

Optimization of memory power is an important design objective in any computer device. However, servers are especially a challenge because the number of DRAMs are large and in aggregate can consume up to 40% of the overall system power. This paper presents power measurement experiments under a variety of server system conditions. Some techniques are proposed to optimize the overall power consumption. The experiments must be carefully planned with defined workloads and voltage regulators of sufficient resolution so that the measurements can be used for both analysis and prediction. The primary objective of this work is to accurately project the power demand from the hardware measurements to confirm that all system DRAM configurations stay within their power budget.