Processing-Using-DRAM: Attaining High-Performance Via Dynamic Precision Bit-Serial Arithmetic (ETH Zurich, et al.)

A new technical paper titled “Proteus: Achieving High-Performance Processing-Using-DRAM via Dynamic Precision Bit-Serial Arithmetic” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich, Cambridge University, Universidad de Córdoba, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and NVIDIA Research.

Abstract

“Processing-using-DRAM (PUD) is a paradigm where the analog operational properties of DRAM structures are used to perform bulk logic operations. While PUD promises high throughput at low energy and area cost, we uncover three limitations of existing PUD approaches that lead to significant inefficiencies: (i) static data representation, i.e., 2’s complement with fixed bit-precision, leading to unnecessary computation over useless (i.e., inconsequential) data; (ii) support for only throughput-oriented execution, where the high latency of individual PUD operations can only be hidden in the presence of bulk data-level parallelism; and (iii) high latency for high-precision (e.g., 32-bit) operations. To address these issues, we propose Proteus, which builds on two key ideas. First, Proteus parallelizes the execution of independent primitives in a PUD operation by leveraging DRAM’s internal parallelism. Second, Proteus reduces the bit-precision for PUD operations by leveraging narrow values (i.e., values with many leading zeros). We compare Proteus to different state-of-the-art computing platforms (CPU, GPU, and the SIMDRAM PUD architecture) for twelve real-world applications. Using a single DRAM bank, Proteus provides (i) 17x, 7.3x, and 10.2x the performance per mm2; and (ii) 90.3x, 21x, and 8.1x lower energy consumption than that of the CPU, GPU, and SIMDRAM, respectively, on average across twelve real-world applications. Proteus incurs low area cost on top of a DRAM chip (1.6%) and CPU die (0.03%).”

Find the technical paper here. January 2o25.

Oliveira, Geraldo F., Mayank Kabra, Yuxin Guo, Kangqi Chen, A. Giray Yağlıkçı, Melina Soysal, Mohammad Sadrosadati et al. “Proteus: Achieving High-Performance Processing-Using-DRAM via Dynamic Precision Bit-Serial Arithmetic.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.17466 (2025).