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  4. SideDRAM: Integrating SoftSIMD Datapaths near DRAM Banks for Energy-Efficient Variable Precision Computation
 
conference paper

SideDRAM: Integrating SoftSIMD Datapaths near DRAM Banks for Energy-Efficient Variable Precision Computation

Medina, Rafael  
•
Biswas, Dwaipayan
•
Levisse, Alexandre Sébastien Julien  
Show more
2025
CODES/ISSS '25: Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis
International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis

By interfacing computing logic directly to the DRAM banks, bank-level Compute-near-Memory (CnM) architectures promise to mitigate the bottleneck at the memory interconnect. While this computation paradigm heavily reduces the energy requirements for data movement across the system, current solutions fail to co-optimize hardware and software to further increase efficiency. Instead, in this manuscript we present SideDRAM, a co-designed bank-level CnM architecture to enable massively parallel and energy-efficient computations near DRAM. In contrast with past solutions, we support flexible data typing and heterogeneous quantization, relying on the robustness of workloads to employ small bitwidths, and enable a row-wide access to the banks to exploit parallelism and spatial locality. As a result, SideDRAM integrates (1) software-defined SIMD (SoftSIMD) datapaths, supporting low-energy computing with flexible precision, (2) an interface to the banks based on very wide registers (VWRs), enabling asymmetric data access to both utilize the full DRAM bank bandwidth and leverage data locality at the datapath, and (3) a low-overhead distributed control plane, allowing the efficient handling of variable data typing. We benchmark SideDRAM as a near-DRAM solution by analyzing the area, performance and energy consumption of an HBM2 CnM channel executing heterogeneously quantized machine learning models. The results show that, compared to the state-of-the-art FIMDRAM design, energy improvements of up to 67% are achieved when a DeiT-S inference is executed with a batch size of 16 under the same area constraints, resulting in energy-delay-area product (EDAP) savings that reach 83%. When comparing to a massively parallel mixed-signal CnM solution, SideDRAM consistently obtains similar performance and better energy efficiency results (geomean of 15x improvement across workloads) at a lower area overhead.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3762641
Author(s)
Medina, Rafael  

EPFL

Biswas, Dwaipayan

IMEC

Levisse, Alexandre Sébastien Julien  
Yu, Pengbo  

EPFL

Zapater Sancho, Marina  

HEIG-VD

Catthoor, Francky

National Technical University of Athens

Ansaloni, Giovanni  

EPFL

Atienza, David  

EPFL

Date Issued

2025

Publisher

ACM

Published in
CODES/ISSS '25: Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis
Published in
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
Subjects

Compute-near-Memory

•

DRAM

•

Energy-efficient computing

•

Heterogeneous quantization

•

Distributed control plane

•

Processing-in-Memory

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
ESL  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis

ESWEEK - CODES+ISSS 2025

Taipei, Taiwan

2025-09-29 - 2025-10-01

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

SNSF

Edge-Companions: Hardware/Software Co-Optimization Toward Energy-MinimalHealth Monitoring at the Edge

10002812

https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10002812

EC H2020

FVLLMONTI project

101016776

SERI

SwissChips research project

Available on Infoscience
August 21, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/251422.2
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