Processor-in-Memory, Reconfigurable, and Asynchronous Processors

Abstract

Processor-in-memory (PIM) or intelligent RAM (IRAM) chips integrate one or more processors with large, high-bandwidth, on-chip DRAM banks, which provide the processor(s) with sufficient bandwidth at a reasonable cost.

Looking further into the future, we envision a point at which off-chip communication is so expensive that all the system memory resides on the processor chip (or module). If a system designer wishes to provide more memory than is available on-chip, another of these homogeneous processor/memory modules is added... Doug Burger James R. Goodman, and Alain Kägi Memory Bandwidth Limitations of Future Microprocessors (The 23rd Annual Int’l Symposium on Computer Architecture May 1996)

Computing devices 10 years from now will include a strong mix of software-programmable hardware and hardware-configurable logic... John Villasenor and William H. Mangione-Smith Configurable Computing (Scientific American, June 1997)