Analysis of Data Transfer Bottlenecks in Commercial PIM Systems: A Study With UPMEM-PIM

Due to emerging workloads that require high memory bandwidth, Processing-in-Memory (PIM) has gained significant attention and led several industrial PIM products to be introduced which are integrated with conventional computing systems. This letter characterizes the data transfer overheads between conventional DRAM address space and PIM address space within a PIM-integrated system using the commercialized PIM device made by UPMEM. Our findings highlight the need for optimization in PIM-integrated systems to address these overheads, offering critical insights for future PIM technologies.