The two rivals, SK hynix & understand the potential of PIM technology, which made them team up to promote the LPDDR6-PIM standard.
Despite fierce competition, the giant chipmakers want to work together on standardizing the LPDDR6-PIM memory
Two of the biggest DRAM makers in the world have now shaken their hands for something they find a lot more advantageous to standardize than to make it another competitive field to dominate each other, at least for now. With PIM(Processing-in-Memroy) technology, LPDDR6 memory is going to tackle some of the most crucial challenges to offer increased computing capabilities.
My Drivers reports that both Samsung and SK Hynix are setting aside their competition for their efforts to standardize the LPDDR6-PIM memory, which will significantly improve system performance, particularly for mainstream client devices. LPDDR6 is expected to be released in late 2025, but without PIM technology, the memory will face the two biggest challenges:
- The Storage Wall, is due to the limitation in data transfer between the memory and processors.
- The Power Wall, which is the increase in power consumption as the computational demands grow
Both are crucial to solving faster processing of AI workloads and removing these bottlenecks can improve the performance of high-end systems drastically. To standardize the LPDDR6-PIM memory, Samsung and SK Hynix must get the PIM technology approved by JEDEC, which is responsible for developing a unified standard for microelectronics.
Through the standardization of PIM, DRAM manufacturers will be able to utilize the technology for their memories, providing the market with improved LPDDR6 memory for faster computation. PIM will be integrated directly into the memory chips as an additional circuit that can perform various computations such as matrix multiplications and logic operations. This will eliminate the need for additional computations on behalf of the system processor, requiring less data transfer between both components.
Not only will this enhance performance, but it will also reduce energy consumption drastically, which on a large scale will be pretty impactful. Using PIM on standard memory interfaces such as DDR and LPDDR will ensure full compatibility with the existing platforms. It will surely add some cost to memory manufacturing initially, but the result will be the accumulation of more profits by the companies.
AI demand is present on both mainstream devices and server platforms and with increasing demand for higher performance, the energy costs also increase. Every small step that can noticeably bring power consumption down will help companies grow and the PIM technology has the potential to impact it significantly. Samsung is aiming to provide the PIM on both client and server DRAM such as LPDDR, GDDR, and HBM memories, and claims that it can save about 70% of energy.
News Source: Mydrivers
