Towards Processing In-Memory

By Weebit Nano

December 14, 2023

One of the most exciting things about the future of computing is the ability to process data inside of the memory. This is especially true since the industry has reached the end of Moore’s Law, and scientists and engineers are focused on finding efficient new architectures to overcome the limitations of modern computing systems. Recent advancements in areas such as generative AI are adding even greater pressure to find such solutions.

Most modern computing systems are based on the von Neumann computing architecture. There is a bottleneck that arises in such systems due to the separation of the processing unit and the memory. In the traditional Von-Neuman architecture, 95% of the energy is consumed by the need to transfer data from the processing unit to the memory back and forth. In systems that need fast response, low latency and high bandwidth, designers are moving the memory closer to the CPU so that data doesn’t need to travel as far. Even better is to do the processing within the memory so the data doesn’t need to travel at all. When computing in memory, logic operations are performed directly in the memory without costly data transfer between the memory and a separate processing unit. Such an architecture promises energy efficiency and the potential to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck.

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