2021 BRN Discussion, page-3044

Thanks Snausage for the research and Yak for getting the link to work.

In my opinion this is a very significant find. I have extracted the most telling part of the article below.

My opinion only DYOR.

“Samsung presented a paper on its HBM-PIM last month at the virtual International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The company said the new technology is in testing inside AI accelerators with leading AI partners.

A Samsung spokesperson described the new HBM-PIM as a technology -- "not a product that is mass-produced and sold." He said it would be available through discussions with each potential customer, starting with the design of a proof of concept, followed by tailoring to meet specific data processing needs.

Jim Handy, general director and semiconductor analyst at Objective Analysis, said the HBM-PIM is a "lab prototype" that Samsung is showing as a way to address a problem "by bringing some of the logic that you'd expect to be in a processor, like a GPU, into the DRAM chips instead."

"They're going to go to places that could use a large volume of these things and say, 'What do you think? Should we make a whole bunch of these, or should we not?'" Handy said. "If enough people sign on that Samsung can sell tens or hundreds of millions of these things, then Samsung will turn it into a product. But if they don't find that large of a market, then it's probably not going to be worthwhile for them."

Handy said customers that would be most intrigued by Samsung's HBM-PIM include internet titans using AI to target advertising and autonomous vehicle manufacturers that face bottlenecks in their AI algorithms caused by the GPUs. He said the HBM-PIM could help them lower costs by enabling them to use less powerful processors.

Handy has seen other vendors target the same AI problem that Samsung is trying to address, including IBM, with a new hardware accelerator chip; Gyrfalcon Technology, with a chip that is based on magnetoresistive RAM, or MRAM; and GSI Technology, with an Associative Processing Unit. PIM vendors include Micron spinoff Natural Intelligence Semiconductor, Upmem and Venray Technology, Handy added. He said computational storage devices can also reduce the amount of data that needs to move around by enabling data processing on solid-state drives.”