FPonAP: Implementation of Floating Point Operations on Associative Processors

The associative processor (AP) is a processing in-memory (PIM) platform that avoids data movement between the memory and the processor by running computations directly in the memory. It is a parallel architecture based on content addressable memory (CAM), allowing it to address data by its content and thus accelerating search and pattern recognition tasks. APs are suggested as a promising solution to the memory wall caused by the data movement bottleneck in traditional Von-Neumann architectures for data-driven applications, such as machine learning. However, modern implementations of the AP still lack support for floating point (FP) operations that are heavily used in the target applications. In this letter, we present a novel implementation of FP operations on the AP and evaluate its performance on the levels of latency and energy, showing that the proposed solution outperforms parallel FP execution on central processing unit and even GPU for large vector sizes.