Memory-Centric MCM-GPU Architecture

The demand for powerful GPUs continues to grow, driven by modern-day applications that require ever increasing computational power and memory bandwidth. Multi-Chip Module (MCM) GPUs provide the scalability potential by integrating GPU chiplets on an interposer substrate, however, they are hindered by their GPU-centric design, i.e., off-chip GPU bandwidth is statically (at design time) allocated to local versus remote memory accesses. This paper presents the memory-centric MCM-GPU architecture. By connecting the HBM stacks on the interposer, rather than the GPUs, and by connecting the GPUs to bridges on the interposer network, the full off-chip GPU bandwidth can be dynamically allocated to local and remote memory accesses. Preliminary results demonstrate the potential of the memory-centric architecture offering an average 1.36× (and up to 1.90×) performance improvement over a GPU-centric architecture.