Dr. Onur Mutlu is a renowned computer scientist and Professor at ETH Zurich whose pioneering research in computer architecture, memory systems, and hardware security has shaped industry standards and influenced technologies used by billions worldwide.
In this article, he shares his insights on advancing memory-centric computing, exploring the challenges, breakthroughs, and future possibilities of next-generation computer memory systems.
With advancements in memory-centric (i.e., processing-in-memory) architectures, what challenges do you foresee in integrating these systems into mainstream computing?
Memory-centric computing (or processing-in-memory) is another fascinating research area where we can change the paradigm of how we do computing. Moving data between memory and processor consumes orders of magnitude more energy than computation. Many results from real systems show that most (e.g., >90%) of the energy spent executing major AI models comes from data movement and memory access, not computation performed on the data. Unfortunately, our existing processor-centric design paradigm is the major fundamental cause of significant data movement across the entire system. All data needs to be processed in computation units, which today are very far away from memory, storage, and sensing units. If we want to make computing truly efficient and high performance (and also robust and sustainable), we should minimize data movement. We can do so by placing computation capability near and inside memory structures (especially high-density memories like DRAM and flash), and thus greatly (i.e., by orders of magnitude) enhance energy efficiency, performance, robustness, security, and sustainability of almost all computing systems we build.
We have been doing research in this area for at least 15 years. We have written many papers and designed many new promising processing-in-memory techniques, advocating for a paradigm shift and demonstrating great energy and performance benefits with processing-in-memory. Processing data near, and in, where data resides or is produced simply makes sense, from a very fundamental first-principles standpoint. Three important works that overview the area, written 12 years apart, are the following:
Onur Mutlu, Ataberk Olgun, and İsmail Emir Yüksel, “Memory-Centric Computing: Solving Computing’s Memory Problem” Invited Paper in Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Memory Workshop (IMW), Monterey, CA, USA, May 2025.
Onur Mutlu, “Memory Scaling: A Systems Architecture Perspective,” Proceedings of the
5th International Memory Workshop (IMW), Monterey, CA, May 2013.
Onur Mutlu, Saugata Ghose, Juan Gomez-Luna, Rachata Ausavarungnirun, Mohammad Sadrosadati, and Geraldo F. Oliveira, “A Modern Primer on Processing in Memory,” Invited Book Chapter in
Emerging Computing: From Devices to Systems – Looking Beyond Moore and Von Neumann, Springer, July 2022 (updated February 2025).
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