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While DRAM cannot easily scale below a 20nm technology node, RRAM suffers far less from scalability issues. Moreover, RRAM’s resistivity enables its use for processing-in-memory (PIM), potentially alleviating the von Neumann bottleneck. Unfortunately, because of technological idiosyncrasies, existing DRAM-centric memory controllers cannot exploit the full potential of RRAM. In this paper, we present the design of a memory controller called CONCEPT. The controller is optimized to exploit unique properties of RRAM to enhance its performance and energy efficiency as well as exploiting RRAM’s PIM capability. We show that with CONCEPT, RRAM can achieve DRAM-like performance and energy efficiency on SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks. Furthermore, using RRAM PIM capabilities, we show a 5X performance gain on a data-intensive in-memory database workload compared to a state-of-the-art CPU-memory computing model.

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While DRAM cannot easily scale below a 20-nm technology node, RRAM suffers far less from scalability issues. Moreover, RRAM's resistivity enables its use for processing-in-memory (PIM), potentially alleviating the von Neumann bottleneck. Unfortunately, because of technological idiosyncrasies, existing DRAM-centric memory controllers cannot exploit the full potential of resistive RAM (RRAM). In this paper, we present the design of a memory controller called CONCEPT. The controller is optimized to exploit unique properties of RRAM to enhance its performance and energy efficiency as well as exploiting RRAM's PIM capability. We show that with CONCEPT, RRAM can achieve DRAM-like performance and energy efficiency on SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks. Furthermore, using RRAM PIM capabilities, we show a 5Â performance gain on a data-intensive in-memory database workload compared to a state-of-the-art CPU-memory computing model. & THE PROCESS TECHNOLOGY scaling of DRAM has so far facilitated low cost-per-bit by enabling reduction in cell size. However, further scaling has proven to be costly due to physical factors, such as the difficulty of fabricating capacitors

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