A performance analysis of PIM, stream processing, and tiled processing on memory-intensive signal processing kernels

Trends in microprocessors of increasing die size and clock speed and decreasing feature sizes have fueled rapidly increasing performance. However, the limited improvements in DRAM latency and bandwidth and diminishing returns of increasing superscalar ILP and cache sizes have led to the proposal of new microprocessor architectures that implement processor-in-memory, stream processing, and tiled processing. Each architecture is typically evaluated separately and compared to a baseline architecture. We evaluate the performance of processors that implement these architectures on a common set of signal processing kernels. The implementation results are compared with the measured performance of a conventional system based on the PowerPC with Altivec. The results show that these new processors show significant improvements over conventional systems and that each architecture has its own strengths and weaknesses.