Memories are Driving Big Architectural Changes - Hold Onto Your Hats!

Memories, long the slowest-changing of any digital technology, are rapidly springing into new form factors, interfaces, and even core technologies, like MRAM, ReRAM, and FRAM. This accelerated shift, combined with the computing industry’s sudden adoption of AI, is driving an era of extreme architectural change in systems. CXL is competing with DDR, HBM is boosting cache sizes, and emerging memories are bringing persistence closer to, and even within the processing chip, while chiplets promise to accelerate that transition. Meanwhile, new approaches like Processing in Memory (PiM) and endpoint AI are being adopted to increase the amount of information that can be captured and analyzed while reducing the amount of data communicated over the network. In this presentation, based on a recently-released report, IEEE president Tom Coughlin and noted memory analyst Jim Handy detail the changes the loom before the computing community, and show a likely course for the adoption of new technologies throughout the industry over the next decade and beyond