Near-memory computing: Past, present, and future

The conventional approach of moving data to the CPU for computation has become a significant performance bottleneck for emerging scale-out data-intensive applications due to their limited data reuse. At the same time, the advancement in 3D integration technologies has made the decade-old concept of coupling compute units close to the memory — called near-memory computing (NMC) — more viable. Processing right at the “home” of data can significantly diminish the data movement problem of data-intensive applications.