Analog Searching of Memory

When I took Fourier Analysis as a undergraduate mathematics student, I remember naively thinking that this could enable “continuous processing”. I thought that physically manipulating signals corresponded exactly (or at least pretty close) to some operators in analysis.

Of course, what I was missing was that signals (at least in computers) aren’t usually used for analog. They are used digitally.

I then “believed” that all computer processing was digital.

Enter this paper: Energy Efficient Data Encoding in DRAM channels exploiting Data Value Similarity.

The basic idea of this paper is to minimize the energy of data transfers by transfering bitwise differences of similar words. The “Data Value similarity” refers to Hamming distance. Small consistent caches are kept on both sides of the data bus for the translation purposes. The novel idea (at least to me) is how the hardware that the authors propose adding to DRAM searches for a similar value.