Making the Case for Feature-Rich Memory Systems: The March Toward Specialized Systems

Many emerging workloads are constrained by the high cost of data access. Innovation in the memory system may soon be the primary driver of the computing economy. The result will be a memory system that is specialized, not commoditized. This article discusses the features that can be meaningfully added to memory devices. Not only do these features execute parts of an application, they may also take care of auxiliary operations that maintain high efficiency, reliability, and security.