| Samsung's Processing-in-Memory (PIM)(chipsandcheese.com) | |
| 278 points by ingve 12 days ago | 106 comments | |
tl;dr: Samsung's LPDDR5X-PIM embeds MAC units at each of 16 DRAM banks, exploiting internal bandwidth (614 GB/s vs 76.8 GB/s external) for low-precision ML compute, while cleverly staying within the standard LPDDR5X protocol by repurposing special row addresses as mode-switching MMIO. However, integration with real systems is painful: PIM mode changes the semantics of read/write commands, breaking caching, prefetching, and speculative execution, and forcing memory regions to be uncacheable and effectively single-threaded. The author argues practical adoption would require extending DRAM interfaces with dedicated compute commands and cache-coherent memory controllers rather than the current mode-hijacking approach. | |
HN Discussion:
| |