Experimental Partnership - FlexRAM: An Advanced Intelligent Memory System

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

EIA-0072102 Josep Torrellas Univ. of Illinois-Champaign TITLE: Experimental Partnership: FlexRAM: An Advanced Intelligent Memory System Dramatic increases in the number of transistors that can be integrated on a single chip have enabled both microprocessor performance and memory chip capacity to rise spectacularly. However, they have also led to an increasingly constraining data transfer bottleneck between processor and memory system. Recognizing the need for new architectural approaches that alleviate this bottleneck, researchers have proposed the integration of processor and DRAM in a single chip. This architecture is popularly known as intelligent memory (IRAM) or processor-in-memory (PIM). Unfortunately, simple integration of current microprocessors and DRAM on a single chip often delivers only modest performance improvements-it moves an off-chip bottleneck on chip. Furthermore, the resulting system is often very hard to program. Finally, Little effort has been invested trying to identify a wide range of applications that can exploit this architecture effectively.