This week’s HotChips conference featured a concept called “Processing in Memory” (PIM) that has been around for a long time but that hasn’t yet found its way into mainstream computing. One presenter said that his firm, a French company called UPMEM, hopes to change that.
What is PIM all about? It’s an approach to improving processing speed by taking advantage of the extraordinary amount of bandwidth available within any memory chip.
The arrays inside a memory chip are pretty square: A word line selects a large number of bits (tens or hundreds of thousands) which all become active at once, each on its own bit line. Then these myriad bits slowly take turns getting onto the I/O pins.
High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) try to get past this bottleneck by stacking special DRAM chips and running Continue reading “UPMEM Processor-in-Memory at HotChips Conference”
