The architecture without inhibit lines is interesting. Did this make the memory faster, or was the main goal simply to reduce the number of sense amplifiers and simplify the board layout?
The main reason was the "inhibit recovery problem". The inhibit line required a large current that went through all the cores. This caused electrical noise, requiring a delay while the noise settled down. Doing away with the inhibit line thus helped performance. The drive lines are also shorter, which also helps performance.
Comments
The architecture without inhibit lines is interesting. Did this make the memory faster, or was the main goal simply to reduce the number of sense amplifiers and simplify the board layout?
The main reason was the "inhibit recovery problem". The inhibit line required a large current that went through all the cores. This caused electrical noise, requiring a delay while the noise settled down. Doing away with the inhibit line thus helped performance. The drive lines are also shorter, which also helps performance.
The paper "2 1/2 D High Speed Memory Systems: Past, Present, and Future" explains this, but not entirely clearly: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4038821