Emerging Technologies for Memory-Centric Computing

Classical computing paradigms based on Von-Neumann and Harvard architectures are reaching their limits when facing data-intensive applications. The memory-centric paradigm appears to be a good candidate to break the memory and power walls by bringing computation closer to, or even completely inside, the memory. While current approaches are based on conventional volatile memory technologies, further performance improvements can be achieved through the use of non-volatile memories since they enable aggressive power-down strategies. A broad range of such memory technologies are emerging with a corresponding variety of benefits and drawbacks. This chapter presents a survey of the use of emerging technologies as a viable and low-cost solution to implement memory-centric architectures and applications.