A Review of 3D-Dynamic Random-Access Memory based Near-Memory Computation

The growth of Neural Networks (NNs) and Machine Learning (ML) usage has rapidly increased over the last decade. Traditional dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) is struggling to meet the computational, throughput demands of these NNs and has become a bottleneck in the system. One of the commonly proposed solutions is Near-Memory Computation (NMC) hardware accelerators to move the computation closer to the data resulting in improved throughput and reduced power consumption. In this paper, we analyze a few critical NMC architecture implementations, specifically those with 3D-Stacked DRAM memory. We have organized a literature review across structures, configuration, application, performance metrics, and present challenges and opportunities.