Samsung’s Aquabolt-XL Processor-In-Memory (Part 1)

Sketch of a sledgehammer driving a wedge into a logFor the past year, since ISSCC in February 2021, Samsung has been strongly promoting its “Aquabolt-XL” Processor-In-Memory (PIM) devices.  In this two-part post The Memory Guy will explain the Aquabolt-XL architecture, its performance, other companies’ similar devices, and discuss the PIM approach’s outlook for commercial success.

Processing in memory is not a Continue reading “Samsung’s Aquabolt-XL Processor-In-Memory (Part 1)”

UPMEM Releases Processor-In-Memory Benchmark Results

Chip layout of Micron's Automata ProcessorOn January 22 Processor-In-Memory (PIM) maker UPMEM announced what the company claims are: “The first silicon-based PIM benchmarks.”  These benchmarks indicate that a Xeon server that has been equipped with UPMEM’s PIM DIMM can perform eleven times as many five-word string searches through 128GB of DRAM in a given amount of time as the Xeon processor can perform on its own.  The company tells us that this provides significant energy savings: the server consumes only one sixth the energy of a standard system.  By using algorithms that have been optimized for parallel processing UPMEM claims to be able to process these searches up to 35 times as quickly as a conventional system.

Furthermore, the same system with an UPMEM PIM is said to Continue reading “UPMEM Releases Processor-In-Memory Benchmark Results”