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arXiv · 2511.07985

PIMfused: Near-Bank DRAM-PIM with Fused-layer Dataflow for CNN Data Transfer Optimization

Simei Yang·Xinyu Shi·Lu Zhao·Yunyu Ling·Quanjun Wang·Francky Catthoor
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Abstract

Near-bank Processing-in-Memory (PIM) architectures integrate processing cores (PIMcores) close to DRAM banks to mitigate the high cost of off-chip memory accesses. When accelerating convolutional neural network (CNN) on DRAM-PIM, performance is often constrained by cross-bank (or cross-PIMcore) data transfers, which are induced by the conventional layer-by-layer dataflow that enforces inter-bank (or inter-PIMcore) dependencies across successive CNN layers. To address this challenge, we propose PIMfused, a hardware-software co-design that enables fused-layer dataflow for end-to-end CNN execution in near-bank DRAM-PIM. By adopting fused-layer dataflow, PIMfused improves data reuse and, more importantly, breaks inter-bank data dependencies, thereby optimizing cross-bank data transfers without sacrificing bank-level parallelism. We study the impact of buffer sizes and PIMcore parallelism (1-bank vs. 4-bank) on PIMfused using end-to-end ResNet18. We present three key takeaways and show that with 4-bank PIMcores, PIMfused achieves overall PPA gains over a GDDR6-AiM-like baseline, cutting memory cycles to 30.6%, energy to 83.4%, and area to 76.5%.

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Simei Yang, Xinyu Shi, Lu Zhao, Yunyu Ling, Quanjun Wang, Francky Catthoor. 2025-11-11. PIMfused: Near-Bank DRAM-PIM with Fused-layer Dataflow for CNN Data Transfer Optimization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07985

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