Digital Design & Computer Architecture - Lecture 23: Memory Hierarchy and Caches (Spring 2022)
The lecture reviewed fundamentals of memory organization and the design of memory hierarchies and caches, emphasizing why SRAM is used for on-chip caches while DRAM serves as main memory due to differing fabrication and capacitor requirements. It surveyed memory technologies — DRAM, SRAM, flash, phase-change (PCM) and emerging resistive memories — highlighting trade-offs such as latency versus density, non-volatility, and endurance constraints. The instructor noted how technologies like flash and PCM can disrupt traditional hierarchies by blurring the line between working memory and storage, and described the complexity of flash-based storage controllers and their internal memory hierarchies. Practical manufacturing and system-design considerations were stressed as key reasons for current architectural choices and potential future shifts.
Memory Centric Computing - Sonova Workshop, 24.10.2022
In a workshop on memory-centric computing, the speaker argued that modern computing is bottlenecked by data movement rather than raw compute, urging co-design of hardware and software to keep memory and compute tightly coupled. He highlighted neural networks and genome...
Digital Design & Computer Arch. - Lecture 22: Memory Organization & Memory Technology (Spring 2022)
In this lecture the professor shifts focus from processors to memory, arguing that memory and storage are the dominant bottlenecks in modern computing. He frames the discussion with Amdahl’s law to show why accelerating computation alone yields limited system speedups...
Memory-Centric Computing - PACT 2022 Tutorial (08.10.2022)
The tutorial frames memory-centric computing as a response to rapidly growing data demands that are outpacing traditional compute-centric architectures. The speaker highlights that modern workloads—large neural networks, databases, graph analytics, and mobile applications—are increasingly bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, capacity, and...