Samsung Puts a Processor Into Memory
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SAMSUNG HAS DESIGNED a new iteration of Aquabolt (its high-end second-generation HBM2 modules). This one has a neat trick to it: integrated into the wafer is a processor to handle data transfers, which would otherwise be run by attached processors. The HBM-PIM (High Band Memory Processing In Memory) module uses some layers from its 3D stack to carry a dinky 300MHz programmable computing unit, or AI engine. The host (the processor) controls this using standard memory commands. The 16-bit PCU can perform FP16 ADD, MUL, MAC, and MAD calculations within the memory. Samsung says it “exploits bank-level parallelism to provide four times the processing bandwidth than an off-chip solution.” Total processing power is quoted as 1.2TFLOPS