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Associative Processing Implemented With Content-Addressable Memories, Luis Sergio Kida

Dissertations and Theses

The associative processing model provides an alternative solution to the von Neumann bottleneck. The memory of an associative computer takes some of the responsibility for processing. Only intermediate results are exchanged between memory and processor. This greatly reduces the amount of communication between them. Content-addressable memories are one implementation of memory for this computational model. Associative computers implemented with CAMs have reported performance improvements of three orders of magnitude, which is equivalent to the performance of the same application running in a conventional computer with clock frequencies of the order of GHz. Among the benefits of content-addressable memories to the …