PIM-Enabled Instructions: A Low-Overhead, Locality-Aware Processing-in-Memory Architecture

Processing-in-memory (PIM) is rapidly rising as a viable solution for the memory wall crisis, rebounding from its unsuc-cessful attempts in 1990s due to practicality concerns, which are alleviated with recent advances in 3D stacking technolo-gies. However, it is still challenging to integrate the PIM architectures with existing systems in a seamless manner due to two common characteristics: unconventional programming models for in-memory computation units and lack of ability to utilize large on-chip caches. In this paper, we propose a new PIM architecture that (1) does not change the existing sequential programming mod-els and (2) automatically decides whether to execute PIM operations in memory or processors depending on the local-ity of data. The key idea is to implement simple in-memor