Oral: Rethinking Floating Point Overheads for Mixed Precision DNN Accelerators

Apr 4, 2021

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Mixed precision DNN accelerators become more ubiquitous especially when both efficient training and inference are required. In this paper, we propose a mixed-precision convolution unit architecture which supports different integer and floating point (FP) precisions. The proposed architecture is based on low-bit inner product units and realizes higher precision based on temporal decomposition. We illustrate how to integrate FP computations on integer-based architecture and evaluate overheads incurred by FP arithmetic support. We argue that alignment and addition overhead for FP inner product can be significant since the maximum exponent difference could be up to 58 bits, which results into a large alignment logic. To address this issue, we illustrate empirically that no more than 26-bit product bits are required and up to 8-bit of alignment is sufficient in most inference cases. We present novel optimizations based on the above observations to reduce the FP arithmetic hardware overheads. Our empirical results, based on simulation and hardware implementation, show significant reduction in FP16 overhead. Over typical mixed precision implementation, the proposed architecture achieves area improvements of up to 25% in TFLOPS/mm^2 and up to 46% in TOPS/mm^2. It also achieves power efficiency improvements of up to 40% in TFLOPS/W and up to 63% in TOPS/W.

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The Conference on Machine Learning and Systems targets research at the intersection of machine learning and systems. The conference aims to elicit new connections amongst these fields, including identifying best practices and design principles for learning systems, as well as developing novel learning methods and theory tailored to practical machine learning workflows.

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