Are you aware of previous work on processor-in-memory architecture research? They considered things like this, but I think it stalled out due to semiconductor process and economic practicality.

This article mostly mentions a UC Berkeley effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_RAM

This page mentions others: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/aries/course/notes/pim.html

> memory be cleared without zeroes

In some specific cases, such as when the Linux kernel maps memory into your process, this is exactly what happens. When you write the page, it faults and clears it on demand; but I don't think there would be a considerable benefit to doing this at a finer granularity.

Ideally, you would prefer to postpone the actual writing to memory to the moment the cached version is evicted from on-chip caches. When you write that data to RAM, it'll take a lot of CPU cycles during which even external memory fetches will end up being delayed. And if you want to write all zeros from that page when all you are using are the first 10 bytes, it's a lot of cycles that are going to waste. Being sure the memory was actually zeroed out when you commit those bytes to DDR could save a relatively large time for the memory buses.