Processing-in-memory: current trends in the development of technology

Moving data between the CPU and RAM is a first-order obstacle to improved performance, scalability, and energy efficiency in today’s systems. Computer systems use a number of methods to reduce the overhead associated with data movement, ranging from traditional mechanisms to new methods such as Proccssing-in-Mcmory (PIM) computation. These methods can be divided into two large areas: processing-near-memory (PNM), where computations are performed in dedicated processing elements, and processing-using-memory (PUM), where computations are performed inside a memory array by exploiting the internal analog operating properties of the memory device. This paper discusses the paradigm of PIM architectures and provides an overview of PUM architectures based on parallel DRAM operations and associative processors.