Towards Efficient LUT-based PIM: A Scalable and Low-Power Approach for Modern Workloads

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Main Authors: Khabbazan, Bahareh, Riera, Marc, González, Antonio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Khabbazan, Bahareh
Riera, Marc
González, Antonio
author_facet Khabbazan, Bahareh
Riera, Marc
González, Antonio
contents Data movement in memory-intensive workloads, such as deep learning, incurs energy costs that are over three orders of magnitude higher than the cost of computation. Since these workloads involve frequent data transfers between memory and processing units, addressing data movement overheads is crucial for improving performance. Processing-using-memory (PuM) offers an effective solution by enabling in-memory computation, thereby minimizing data transfers. In this paper we propose Lama, a LUT-based PuM architecture designed to efficiently execute SIMD operations by supporting independent column accesses within each mat of a DRAM subarray. Lama exploits DRAM's mat-level parallelism and open-page policy to significantly reduce the number of energy-intensive memory activation (ACT) commands, which are the primary source of overhead in most PuM architectures. Unlike prior PuM solutions, Lama supports up to 8-bit operand precision without decomposing computations, while incurring only a 2.47% area overhead. Our evaluation shows Lama achieves an average performance improvement of 8.5x over state-of-the-art PuM architectures and a 3.8x improvement over CPU, along with energy efficiency gains of 6.9x/8x, respectively, for bulk 8-bit multiplication. We also introduce LamaAccel, an HBM-based PuM accelerator that utilizes Lama to accelerate the inference of attention-based models. LamaAccel employs exponential quantization to optimize product/accumulation in dot-product operations, transforming them into simpler tasks like addition and counting. LamaAccel delivers up to 9.3x/19.2x reduction in energy and 4.8x/9.8x speedup over TPU/GPU, along with up to 5.8x energy reduction and 2.1x speedup over a state-of-the-art PuM baseline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02142
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Efficient LUT-based PIM: A Scalable and Low-Power Approach for Modern Workloads
Khabbazan, Bahareh
Riera, Marc
González, Antonio
Hardware Architecture
Data movement in memory-intensive workloads, such as deep learning, incurs energy costs that are over three orders of magnitude higher than the cost of computation. Since these workloads involve frequent data transfers between memory and processing units, addressing data movement overheads is crucial for improving performance. Processing-using-memory (PuM) offers an effective solution by enabling in-memory computation, thereby minimizing data transfers. In this paper we propose Lama, a LUT-based PuM architecture designed to efficiently execute SIMD operations by supporting independent column accesses within each mat of a DRAM subarray. Lama exploits DRAM's mat-level parallelism and open-page policy to significantly reduce the number of energy-intensive memory activation (ACT) commands, which are the primary source of overhead in most PuM architectures. Unlike prior PuM solutions, Lama supports up to 8-bit operand precision without decomposing computations, while incurring only a 2.47% area overhead. Our evaluation shows Lama achieves an average performance improvement of 8.5x over state-of-the-art PuM architectures and a 3.8x improvement over CPU, along with energy efficiency gains of 6.9x/8x, respectively, for bulk 8-bit multiplication. We also introduce LamaAccel, an HBM-based PuM accelerator that utilizes Lama to accelerate the inference of attention-based models. LamaAccel employs exponential quantization to optimize product/accumulation in dot-product operations, transforming them into simpler tasks like addition and counting. LamaAccel delivers up to 9.3x/19.2x reduction in energy and 4.8x/9.8x speedup over TPU/GPU, along with up to 5.8x energy reduction and 2.1x speedup over a state-of-the-art PuM baseline.
title Towards Efficient LUT-based PIM: A Scalable and Low-Power Approach for Modern Workloads
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02142