Intelligent Memory

Intelligent Memory

Professor’s comment: Not only does this research paper reflect an obvious understanding of the complexities of the technology under review, it does so in remarkably clear prose. The student obviously took to heart one of the central tenets of my course, that technical material aimed at a technical audience can be clearly written.

Abstract

The growing processor-memory performance gap creates a bottleneck in the system; the memory system cannot supply enough data to keep the processor busy. Before this bottleneck is resolved, faster processors can do little to improve the overall system performance. Intelligent memory is a new memory/system architecture that aims to resolve this bottleneck.

There are four intelligent memory models with published results: Active Pages, CRAM, PPRAM, and IRAM. Despite their architectural differences, they all agree to put processing elements physically closer to the memory, lifting the bottleneck by increasing processor-memory data bandwidth.

Initial studies of these four models have shown promising results. However, in order for these academic ideas to become a reality, intelligent memory researchers must study how their models can be cost-effectively integrated into commercial computer systems.

Introduction

Microprocessor and DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) technology are headed in different directions: the former increases in speed while the latter increases in capacity. This technological difference has led to what is known as the Processor-Memory Performance Gap. This performance gap, which is growing at about 50% per year, creates a serious bottleneck to the overall system performance [Pat97].

The problem boils dow...

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Elliott D.; “Computational RAM,” http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~dunc/cram

Murakami, K.; Inoue, K.; and Miyajima, H.; “Parallel Processing RAM (PPRAM) (in English),” Japan-Germany Forum on Information Technology, Nov. 1997.

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Patterson, D.; Anderson T.; Cardwell N.; Fromm R., et al; “A Case for Intelligent DRAM: IRAM,” IEEE Micro, April 1997.