Processing-in-Memory: Exploring the Design Space

With the emergence of 3D-DRAM, Processing-in-Memory has once more become of great interest to the research community and industry. In this paper, we present our observations on a subset of the PIM design space. We show how the architectural choices for PIM core frequency and cache sizes will affect the overall power consumption and energy efficiency. Our findings include detailed power consumption modeling for an ARM-like core as a PIM core. We show the maximum number of PIM cores we can place in the logic layer with respect to a power budget. In addition, we explore the optimal design choices for the number of cores as a function of frequency, utilization, and energy efficiency.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ARCS
• Authors: Marko Scrbak, Mahzabeen Islam, Krishna M. Kavi, Mike Ignatowski, Nuwan Jayasena
• Keywords: ARCS 2015, Software Engineering