Embodiments of the invention include a machine-readable medium having stored thereon instructions, which if performed by a machine causes the machine to perform a method that includes assigning an urgency of requests based on a priority level for incoming requests and associated entries in at least one priority queue, assigning an urgency delta for anti-starvation that indicates urgency promotion to prevent starvation for the incoming requests in the at least one priority queue, determining conflict information including whether an incoming request is dependent on any request already present in the at least one queue, determining all contending requests within the at least one priority queue during a cycle, and sending a selected contending request to a memory controller for accessing memory.