Compute-Enabled CXL Memory Expansion for Efficient Retrieval Augmented Generation
Derrick Quinn, Neel Patel, Mohammad Alian · IEEE Micro · 2025
Conventional near-memory processing architectures often strike a trade-off between memory capacity and memory bandwidth, leading to high initial data movement or high capital costs due to memory stranding. In this work, we introduce compute-enabled memory expansion enabled by CXL as a solution for the widespread adoption of near-memory processing at scale. We present the Intelligent Knowledge Store (IKS), which is fundamentally a memory expander with lightweight near-memory accelerators that leverage high internal memory bandwidth to accelerate dense retrieval, a key component of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). IKS disaggregates its internal memory capacity and supports both spatial and temporal multi-tenancy. It significantly accelerates high-quality dense retrieval while enabling multi-tenancy with modest memory access interference.