Yes, but a DMA controller sit out on the memory bus to do the same kind of work the CPU could be doing, controlling bus traffic between memory modules.

I think the whole idea of PIM is to be able to scale up and do work locally within the memory module, without the bottleneck of the system memory bus. This only works for embarrassingly parallel workloads that don't actually depend on the bisection bandwidth across the global memory.

If you start talking about PIM that is all interconnected, your application is back to being bound by the system memory bus. Maybe it's a new package design, but you're basically building yet another NUMA interconnect architecture, not a PIM architecture.