For decades, computing improved by making processors faster. Increasingly, the bottleneck is not compute but memory – how quickly data can be fed to those hungry cores. The gap between processor speed and memory speed, long called the memory wall, now shapes the design of everything from phones to data centers.
New approaches, from high-bandwidth memory stacked beside the chip to memory pooled across a network, aim to close it. Where data lives is becoming as important as how fast it is processed.
The next leaps in performance will be won or lost at the memory boundary.
