A novel approach to hardware data compression may free up more memory used by computers and mobile devices, allowing them to run faster and perform more tasks simultaneously.
In a paper being presented at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems this week, the MIT researchers describe the first approach to compress objects across the memory hierarchy. This reduces memory usage while improving performance and efficiency.
Programmers could benefit from this technique when programming in any modern programming language — such as Java, Python, and Go — that stores and manages data in objects, without changing their code. On their end, consumers would see computers that can run much faster or can run many more apps at the same speeds. Because each application consumes less memory, it runs faster, so a device can support more applications within its allotted memory.
For more, check out this MIT story.