Samsung's LPDDR5X-PIM Keeps Standard Memory Commands but Complicates Software

Samsung's LPDDR5X-PIM places a MAC block at each of 16 banks, reaching 614 GB/s internal bandwidth versus 76.8 GB/s for regular accesses. Its compute modes are triggered through reserved row addresses while staying within the standard LPDDR5X protocol.

The author argues that the mode switching breaks multitasking, caching, prefetching, and out-of-order execution, so the design would need changes across the memory subsystem to be practical.