In computing, there are many concepts that are invented, but they take years to be implemented in domestic hardware, one of these concepts is the Intelligent RAM or IRAM, which could be one of the technologies that influences the RAM memories that we see in the future. If you want to know what this interesting concept consists of and how it works, we will explain it to you in detail.
RAM is one of the fundamental parts of a computer and is as important as the CPU, since without RAM the CPU cannot execute programs.
However, in recent years RAM memory improvements have not resulted in any revolutionary changes and it is a technology that follows a monotonous evolution generation after generation, a paradigm that will reach a limit at a certain point, in which architects They will have to find new solutions to solve the new bottlenecks that will arise.
The monotonous evolution of RAM
With each generation of DDR memory, be it standard DDR, GDDR or even LPDDR, the following process occurs:
- A new manufacturing node is used for a new generation of memory.
- The voltage required at the new manufacturing node to achieve the same speed as the previous generation is lower.
- The clock speed is raised with the new node, thereby increasing the memory bandwidth.
- Higher density is used to increase memory capacity.
This process has been continuous for several generations, the problem is that with each new manufacturing node that appears on the market is that the speed obtained with respect to the previous node is increasingly low, which widens the enormous gap between the processor and RAM, which continues to grow year after year in an increasingly progressive manner.
Smart RAM, a processor inside memory
The concept of IRAM is to place an integrated processor in each of the RAM memory chips, this would not be a complete CPU, but it would serve to accelerate certain operations that are carried out in the face of the RAM, thanks to the fact that said processor is in the own memory. And it will do so by consuming much less energy due to the less distance from the communication routes.
A possible application? Suppose we want to copy the contents of one memory bank to another, in current processors this copy of data is carried out by the processor using the support RAM itself. Due to the distance between the CPU and RAM, the CPU will do that task at a much slower speed than the processor inside RAM.
It must be remembered that we are not talking about a CPU , since it would not execute a program sequentially as if it were a processor, but the instructions it executes are selected by the processor (CPU, GPU, etc.) that is connected to the RAM smart.
How would Smart RAM be used?
When a CPU communicates with RAM, what it does is indicate the memory address where the data it wants to access is located, whether it is for reading or writing, to do this both the RAM and the processor have two collections of pins to communicate with each other.
- Addressing pins : That point to a specific memory bank
- Data pins: That transmit the data to and from the memory banks.
When accessing the RAM: first the CPU indicates the address and then the data.
For intelligent RAM, a series of additional pins are added, which are used to choose which instruction the internal processor will perform in RAM with the data inside it. The number of instructions that it supports will be the square of the pins assigned for instruction, for example if 8 pins are assigned the number of instructions will be 256.
Higher processor performance thanks to smart RAM
Due to the nature of RAM , every processor, regardless of its architecture, has to wait for the RAM to respond when an instruction has made a request for data to it, because the “distance” between the processors and the RAM is Getting bigger there are certain instructions that progress less and less generation after generation, so it will reach the point where most instructions will be slower in the new architectures.
With intelligent memories this will not happen, the CPU will be able to continue executing instructions without having to wait, since it will only have to wait for the intelligent RAM to put the data on the CPU’s data bus. In the case of an instruction that manipulates a value in RAM, you will not have to wait to do the work, you will only have to tell the smart RAM to write that data to a certain bank and forget about it.
For what it contributes is an acceleration in all the instructions that depend on the speed of the memory in different types of processors, since the internal processor in RAM will take less data to search for the data and modify it or send it to the CPU than the CPU itself. CPU.
Different applications of smart RAM
There are different applications for Smart RAM.
- In multimedia, decoders of image formats such as JPEG, music formats such as MP3,
- With regard to data cryptography, we can make the smart RAM processor encrypt and decrypt the data included in RAM using cryptographic algorithms, this is key for markets where data privacy is very important.
- It can be used for searching and manipulating information in a database at high speed.
- In-memory garbage collector, anyone who has programmed in Java will understand the benefits of this.
The key question is: when will the intelligent RAM application become indispensable in our computers? At the moment when the speed difference between RAM and processors affects the evolution of the performance of the latter.