Associative memory

Associative memory is a non Von Neumann computing architecture. It is characterized by the fact that each address in an associative memory has a small amount of computing power.

This allows such operations as "Do any of you memory locations contain this data?" to execute in just a few cycles rather than the approach of searching through all memory locations for the data that is necessary with traditional architectures.

Another name used for a particular type of associative memory is content addressable memory.