A Survey of Different Approaches for Overcoming the Processor-Memory Bottleneck

The growing rate of technology improvements has caused dramatic advances in processor performances, causing significant speed-up of processor working frequency and increased amount of instructions which can be processed in parallel. The given development of processor's technology has brought performance improvements in computer systems, but not for all the types of applications. The reason for this resides in the well known Von-Neumann bottleneck problem which occurs during the communication between the processor and the main memory into a standard processor-centric system. This problem has been reviewed by many scientists, which proposed different approaches for improving the memory bandwidth and latency. This paper provides a brief review of these techniques and also gives a deep analysis of various memorycentric systems that implement different approaches of merging or placing the memory near to the processing elements. Within this analysis we discuss the advantages, disadvantages and the application (purpose) of several well-known memory-centric systems.