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System Level Energy Comparison of DRAM and MRAM for Frame‑based MobileNetV3 Inference
| International Journal of Computer Applications |
| Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
| Volume 187 - Number 90 |
| Year of Publication: 2026 |
| Authors: Che-Ping Lin |
10.5120/ijca2026926581
|
Che-Ping Lin . System Level Energy Comparison of DRAM and MRAM for Frame‑based MobileNetV3 Inference. International Journal of Computer Applications. 187, 90 ( Mar 2026), 23-29. DOI=10.5120/ijca2026926581
Abstract
Energy efficiency is a critical requirement for power-constrained inference workloads, especially in edge scenarios where data are often processed in a frame-oriented manner. While MRAM has been widely explored for low-standby-power systems, its system-level energy behavior under practical inference-driven memory access patterns still requires careful evaluation. A comparative energy analysis is presented for MRAM and DRAM memory access for frame-based MobileNetV3 inference under high-resolution (4K-class) input scenarios, where the memory access intensity is scaled to reflect high-resolution frame workloads rather than pixel-level convolutional dataflows. A counter-based, event-driven energy estimation framework is used to account for DRAM background activity, read/write traffic, and refresh overhead, as well as MRAM read/write energy using a charged-cycle abstraction. The evaluation explicitly incorporates frame gaps, enabling power-gating opportunities and a fair comparison between volatile and non-volatile memory domains under the same workload timeline. Experimental results show that DRAM energy is dominated by continuous background power and refresh overhead, whereas MRAM achieves substantially lower energy per frame due to low standby leakage and effective power gating during frame intervals. These findings highlight the importance of workload-aware memory energy evaluation and suggest that MRAM is a promising memory option for energy-efficient frame-based inference in power-limited systems.
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