PipePIM: Maximizing Computing Unit Utilization in ML-Oriented Digital PIM by Pipelining and Dual Buffering

A digital processing-in-memory (PIM) that integrates computing units (CUs) with DRAM banks emerges as a promising technique for accelerating matrix–vector multiplication (MV). However, activating and precharging all banks incur significant overheads in a digital PIM based on conventional DRAM, which is limited to activating only a single subarray in a bank. Moreover, a digital PIM utilizes a vector buffer to store and reuse the input vector. This necessitates repeated buffer writes, incurring substantial overhead for large MV. Consequently, these overheads reduce CU utilization in a digital PIM, degrading the performance. To overcome these issues, we propose PipePIM, which maximizes CU utilization in a digital PIM by pipelining and dual buffering. PipePIM consists of two primary schemes: 1) subarray-level pipelining (SAPI) and 2) dual vector buffer. They exploit and extend the features of a multitude of activated subarrays (MASA) introduced by subarray-level parallelism (SALP). SAPI enables a digital PIM to perform activation, precharging, and computation on different subarrays in a pipelined manner. Through SAPI, these operations are overlapped, and activation and precharging overheads are hidden. A dual vector buffer employs two vector buffers and manages them as ping-pong buffering, one for computation and another for buffer write simultaneously. To facilitate it, PipePIM proposes a half-division mode (HDM) enabling independent access to two activated subarrays with marginal area increase. We demonstrate the improvements by PipePIM on the state-of-the-art digital PIMs, Newton and HBM-PIM. Our simulation results indicate that the average speedups of Newton and HBM-PIM on MV are <tex-math notation="LaTeX">2.16× </tex-math> and <tex-math notation="LaTeX">1.74× </tex-math>, respectively.