TAILIEUCHUNG - FlexRAM: Toward an Advanced Intelligent Memory System A Retrospective Paper

FlexRAM: Toward an Advanced Intelligent Memory System A Retrospective Paper lead to our ICCD-1999 FlexRAM paper started in 1996. At that time, there was great interest in potential of integrating compute capabilities in large DRAM memories — an architecture called processing in memory (PIM) or intelligent memory. | FlexRAM Toward an Advanced Intelligent Memory System A Retrospective Paper Josep Torrellas Department of Computer Science University of Illinois torrellas@ http I. Context of the Work The work that lead to our ICCD-1999 FlexRAM paper 4 started in 1996. At that time there was great interest in the potential of integrating compute capabilities in large DRAM memories an architecture called Processing-In-Memory PIM or Intelligent Memory. Prof. Kogge at the University of Notre Dame had been an early and persistent proponent of the technology since his EXECUBE work 6 . Prof. Patterson at UC Berkeley had been leading the Berkeley IRAM project 11 and co-organized a workshop on these architectures in June 1997 12 . In addition Dr. Lucas from DARPA was outlining plans for an effort in this area. Finally some chip manufacturers were investing in a DRAM technology that could be compatible with high-speed logic . IBM s CMOS 7LD and Mitsubishi s eRaM. At Illinois my research group was trying to understand what a PIM computer architecture might entail. Our initial emphasis was on understanding the needs of the driving applications for this technology. In May 1998 I started a sabbatical at IBM . Watson Research Center which ended up being very useful for this project. My host Dr. Pattnaik also a co-author of the ICCD-1999 paper joined the project and put me in touch with IBM experts on DRAM technology and potential applications for PIM systems. II. DEVELOPING the Ideas We proposed a design that places many tiny cores in the memory system of an otherwise commodity machine. The main processor s of the machine is left unmodified since it works well for legacy applications. The memory cores are small to minimize losses in memory integration and numerous to extract high bandwidth. Moreover they are general-purpose and not designed to pattern-match any particular algorithm. We also detailed a possible layout of the intelligent memory chips for 180nm.

• Phần cứng
• Toward an Advanced Intelligent Memory System
• A Retrospective Paper
• Developing the ideas
• Intelligent memory
• Intelligent memory the future
• ICCD 1999 FlexRAM