Samsung puts compute inside LPDDR5X memory banks — and the software cost is the story

At Hot Chips 2026, covered by Chips and Cheese on 29 August 2026, Samsung detailed an LPDDR5X-9600 part with processing-in-memory blocks inside each of its 16 DRAM banks. Working from internal bandwidth the blocks see 614 GB/s where an external controller sees 76.8 GB/s, and each chip contributes about 1.2 INT8/FP8 TOPS (2.4 with 4-bit weights) — eight chips land near the NPU in Intel Meteor Lake. Chips and Cheese notes the catch: PIM mode needs uncacheable mappings and does not sit well with multithreading, caching or speculative execution, so the memory-side win is paid for on the CPU side.

What it means On-device inference keeps running into memory bandwidth, and this is the clearest public accounting of what moving compute into DRAM actually costs the rest of the machine.