Adaptive throttling of memory accesses, such as throttling RDRAM accesses in a real-time system

摘要

Apparatus and methods to adaptively throttle accesses to memory employ a masking tool to specify the percentage of memory bandwidth available for access. The apparatus applies the mask and monitors the number of memory accesses during a throttle-monitoring window. If the number of memory accesses during the throttle-monitoring window exceeds or is fewer than the percentage of memory bandwidth specified by the mask, access to the memory continues until the end of the throttle-monitoring window and at the end of the throttle-monitoring window the apparatus selects the next lower mask for a lower memory bandwidth allocation or selects the next higher mask for a higher memory bandwidth allocation, respectively.