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