NeuroPIM: Felxible Neural Accelerator for Processing-in-Memory Architectures

The performance of microprocessors under many modern workloads is mainly limited by the off-chip memory bandwidth. The emerging process-in-memory paradigm present a unique opportunity to reduce data movement overheads by moving computation closer to memory. State-of-the-art processing-in-memory proposals stack a logic layer on top of one or multiple memory layers in a 3D fashion and leverage the logic layer to build near-memory processing units. Such processing units are either application-specific accelerators or general-purpose cores. In this paper, we present NeuroPIM, a new processing-in-memory architecture that uses a neural network as the memory-side general-purpose accelerator. This design is mainly motivated by the observation that in many real-world applications, some program regions, or even the entire program, can be replaced by a neural network that is learned to approximate the program’s output. NeuroPIM benefits from both the flexibility of general-purpose processors and superior performance of application-specific accelerators. Experimental results show that NeuroPIM provides up to 41% speedup over a processor-side neural network accelerator and up to 8x speedup over a general-purpose processor.