Exploring the Processing-in-Memory design space

With the emergence of 3D-DRAM, Processing-in-Memory has once more become of great interest to the research community and industry. Here 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. We include a detailed power consumption breakdown for an ARM-like core as a PIM core. We show the maximum possible number of PIM cores we can place in the logic layer with respect to a predefined power budget. Additionally, we catalog additional sources of power consumption in a system with PIM such as 3D-DRAM link power and discuss the possible power reduction techniques. We describe the shortcomings of using ARM-like cores for PIM and discuss other alternatives for the PIM cores. Finally, we explore the optimal design choices for the number of cores as a function of performance, utilization, and energy efficiency.