GoKawiilSamsung shows LPDDR5X memory with built-in compute at Hot Chips 2026
Samsung unveiled a 16GB LPDDR5X memory package that runs computation directly inside the chip, achieving 614 GB/s of internal bandwidth between its DRAM banks and compute units. That figure is eight times higher than the 76.8 GB/s the same package can push through its external pins, according to a Tom's Hardware report from the conference.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
AI inference, especially single-token text generation, is bottlenecked by how fast weights can be pulled from memory rather than by raw compute power. By moving multiplication logic inside the memory itself, Samsung's design could let chips tap bandwidth that today's architecture simply cannot funnel through standard pins, potentially easing one of the biggest constraints on running large language models efficiently.
- Samsung's PIM-enabled LPDDR5X hits 614 GB/s internally, matching Apple's M5 Max unified memory bandwidth.
- External pin bandwidth of 76.8 GB/s is only an eighth of what the memory banks can actually deliver.
- Processing-in-memory chiefly benefits low-intensity, bandwidth-bound workloads like batch-1 autoregressive token generation.
Apple MacBook Pro (M4 Max) — The article uses a top-spec MacBook Pro's unified memory bandwidth as the yardstick for Samsung's PIM claims, and the M4 Max machine is the shipping version of that idea today: huge unified memory feeding CPU, GPU and Neural Engine on one package. It's a practical way to run local LLM inference now, while processing-in-memory DRAM is still a conference demo.
See Apple MacBook Pro (M4 Max) on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: ben3d.ca, 2026-08-26
Published there as: “Processing in Memory: DRAM Is About to Do Math”
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