The capacity of memory devices is expected to increase drastically with adoption of the forthcoming memory and integration technologies. This is a welcome improvement especially for datacenter servers running modern data-intensive applications. Nonetheless, for such servers to fully benefit from the increasing capacity, the bandwidth of interconnects between processors and the memory devices must also increase proportionally, which becomes ever costlier under unabating physical constraints such as power and thermal limits. In this talk, I am going to present three memory architecture-system co-design proposals that aimed to tackle the aforementioned memory bandwidth challenge. All these proposals meaningfully impacted the recent innovation of memory system architecture by the industry. Specifically, I will first present the world's first High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) based Processing In Memory (PIM) that was successfully integrated with AMD MI-100 GPUs and became the foundation of the industry standardization effort on PIM. Second, I will present AxDIMM which has enabled the industry-leading research on near-DRAM acceleration and bridged such research before Compute eXpress Link (CXL) based memory modules become available. Lastly, I will present Alloy, a memory system architecture which exactly envisioned the emerging memory system architecture based on CXL.

Nam Sung Kim is the W.J. ‘Jerry’ Sanders III – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Endowed Chair Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a fellow of both ACM and IEEE. From 2018 to 2020, he was on leave to lead the development of next-generation DRAM products which will change the computing paradigm at a major memory manufacturing company as a Sr. Vice President. He is the recipient of many awards including Intel Fellowship in 2002, the IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Best Paper Award in 2003, NSF CAREER Award in 2010, ACM/IEEE Most Influential International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) Paper Award in 2017, and IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Test of Time Award, 2021. He is a hall of fame member of all three major computer architecture conferences, IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), MICRO, and ISCA.