CONCEPT: A Column- Oriented Memory Controller for Efficient Memory and PIM Operations in RRAM

WhileDRAMcannot easily scale belowa 20-nmtechnology node,RRAM
suffers far less fromscalability issues.Moreover,RRAM’s resistivity enables its use for
processing-in-memory (PIM), potentially alleviating the von Neumann bottleneck.
Unfortunately, because of technological idiosyncrasies, existingDRAM-centricmemory
controllers cannot exploit the full potential of resistiveRAM(RRAM). In this paper,we
present the design of amemory controller calledCONCEPT. The controller is optimized to
exploit unique properties ofRRAMto enhance its performance and energy efficiency aswell
as exploitingRRAM’s PIMcapability.We showthat withCONCEPT,RRAMcan achieve
DRAM-like performance and energy efficiency on SPECCPU2006 benchmarks. Furthermore,
usingRRAMPIMcapabilities,weshowa 5 performance gain on a data-intensive in-memory
databaseworkload compared to a state-of-the-art CPU-memory computingmodel.