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With the growing performance gap between the memory and computing logic technologies, the memory system design has become an important design problem. Anyway the dynamics of memory technologies complicate the memory system design. To help with the memory system design, a suitable memory model and memory simulator are important tools. However most existing memory models focus on the memory hierarchy and do not address the detail of various memory technologies. For some applications, such as computer graphics ones, these simplified models are not appropriate. In this thesis we proposed a new high level memory model based on the 3 locality properties observed in most applications: the temporal, the spatial and the sequential locality. With the locality properties we classified memory accesses into four types and modeled the four access types with different parameters. We have also designed rectangle page capability into the memory model for graphics applications. We built a 3-D graphics simulation environment using the memory model. With the simulation environment we are able to test memory system performance for computer graphics applications. Using the simulation environment we have analyzed the performance of current memory technologies. We observed that memory technologies today do not yield satisfactory performance for small primitives. To improve the performance chip-level integration is necessary. We compared different system integration approaches and found that logic-enhanced memory technology is a better one for graphics applications. Finally we proposed two logic-enhanced memory designs in computer graphics. The first is to implement a virtual clear logic onto the memory. In this design we placed a management table on the memory using chip area overhead less than 10%. The second application is to implement correct anti-aliasing and transparency using pixel-level sorting. With logic-enhanced memory we could trade the memory capacity for the correctness and performance. The resulting logic area overhead is also less than 10%.
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