Towards Integration of a Dedicated Memory Controller and Its Instruction Set to Improve Performance of Systems Containing Computational SRAM

Abstract

In-memory computing (IMC) aims to solve the performance gap between CPU and memories introduced by the memory wall. However, it does not address the energy wall problem caused by data transfer over memory hierarchies. This paper proposes the data-locality management unit (DMU) to efficiently transfer data from a DRAM memory to a computational SRAM (C-SRAM) memory allowing IMC operations. The DMU is tightly coupled within the C-SRAM and allows one to align the data structure in order to perform effective in-memory computation. We propose a dedicated instruction set within the DMU to issue data transfers. The performance evaluation of a system integrating C-SRAM within the DMU compared to a reference scalar system architecture shows an increase from ×5.73 to ×11.01 in speed-up and from ×29.49 to ×46.67 in energy reduction, versus a system integrating C-SRAM without any transfer mechanism compared to a reference scalar system architecture.