In another comment, I posted a link to the CRAM presentation that mentioned a chip.
This article also mentions some hardware:
Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression.
I don’t think it would say that if they meant the CPU was doing the compression.
There is no mention of any extra hardware here though. The article even suggests this to benefit existing hardware like the steam deck.
In another comment, I posted a link to the CRAM presentation that mentioned a chip.
This article also mentions some hardware:
I don’t think it would say that if they meant the CPU was doing the compression.