Flex-PE: Flexible and SIMD Multi-Precision Processing Element for AI Workloads

Autor:	Lokhande, Mukul, Raut, Gopal, Vishvakarma, Santosh Kumar
Rok vydání:	2024
Předmět:	Computer Science - Hardware Architecture Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Computer Science - Distributed Parallel and Cluster Computing Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Image and Video Processing
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
Popis:	The rapid adaptation of data driven AI models, such as deep learning inference, training, Vision Transformers (ViTs), and other HPC applications, drives a strong need for runtime precision configurable different non linear activation functions (AF) hardware support. Existing solutions support diverse precision or runtime AF reconfigurability but fail to address both simultaneously. This work proposes a flexible and SIMD multiprecision processing element (FlexPE), which supports diverse runtime configurable AFs, including sigmoid, tanh, ReLU and softmax, and MAC operation. The proposed design achieves an improved throughput of up to 16X FxP4, 8X FxP8, 4X FxP16 and 1X FxP32 in pipeline mode with 100% time multiplexed hardware. This work proposes an area efficient multiprecision iterative mode in the SIMD systolic arrays for edge AI use cases. The design delivers superior performance with up to 62X and 371X reductions in DMA reads for input feature maps and weight filters in VGG16, with an energy efficiency of 8.42 GOPS / W within the accuracy loss of 2%. The proposed architecture supports emerging 4-bit computations for DL inference while enhancing throughput in FxP8/16 modes for transformers and other HPC applications. The proposed approach enables future energy-efficient AI accelerators in edge and cloud environments. Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Preprint, Submitted to TVLSI Regular papers
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11702 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv