Then perhaps you might be serve better by the linked article, which is kinda the "dumbed down" version of the Drepper whitepaper.  But I don't see why detail is bad.  The Drepper paper is pretty much the <i>only</i> place, short of JEDEC specs and manufacturer datasheets, where you can get an exposition about how modern DRAM works.<p>(FWIW: his similar whitepapers on ELF shared libraries and glibc TLS are equally great, and also pretty much the canonical review documents on those subjects.)