"Overcoming the Memory Wall: NMC and IMC for AI"

View profile for Naveen Jain

Sr. Director of Engineering at Juniper Networks | Investor | Advisor

Breaking the Memory Wall: Near-Memory and In-Memory Computing for Next-Gen AI One of the most pressing challenges in modern computing is the so-called “memory wall,” where the cost of moving data between processors and memory far exceeds the cost of performing the actual computation. To overcome this bottleneck, researchers and industry are exploring two complementary approaches: Near-Memory Computing (NMC) and In-Memory Computing (IMC). Near-Memory Computing places processors or accelerators physically close to memory, often using advanced 2.5D/3D integration, to reduce latency and energy consumption while still relying on traditional digital logic. In contrast, In-Memory Computing goes a step further by embedding computation directly within the memory arrays, allowing data to be processed where it resides and enabling massive parallelism. IMC, particularly with emerging non-volatile memory technologies, promises orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency for AI and machine learning workloads, though it faces challenges in precision and integration. Together, these paradigms represent a fundamental shift in AI system design, blurring the line between computation and storage to deliver the performance and energy gains demanded by future applications. Any thoughts?

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Nice Post Naveen. Exciting field. I think the real opportunity is in blending both smartly - using NMC for flexibility (changing weights etc) and IMC for dense math - to deliver the efficiency required for future AI system scalability.

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