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Show HN: Maddness – Energy-efficient DNNs without multiplying (arxiv.org)
2 points by joennlae on Nov 20, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A new chip turns matrix multiplication—the math at AI's core—into lookups and additions by hashing numbers into buckets, so it needs no multipliers. It runs about 25 times more energy-efficiently than standard matrix-multiplication chips, and a trainable version still classifies images accurately.

Abstract · Stella Nera: A Differentiable Maddness-Based Hardware Accelerator for Efficient Approximate Matrix Multiplication

Artificial intelligence has surged in recent years, with advancements in machine learning rapidly impacting nearly every area of life. However, the growing complexity of these models has far outpaced advancements in available hardware accelerators, leading to significant computational and energy demands, primarily due to matrix multiplications, which dominate the compute workload. Maddness (i.e., Multiply-ADDitioN-lESS) presents a hash-based version of product quantization, which renders matrix multiplications into lookups and additions, eliminating the need for multipliers entirely. We present Stella Nera, the first Maddness-based accelerator achieving an energy efficiency of 161 TOp/s/[email protected], 25x better than conventional MatMul accelerators due to its small components and reduced computational complexity. We further enhance Maddness with a differentiable approximation, allowing for gradient-based fine-tuning and achieving an end-to-end performance of 92.5% Top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10.

Jannis Schönleber, Lukas Cavigelli, Matteo Perotti, Luca Benini, Renzo Andri
arXiv:2311.10207 · cs.AR, cs.CV, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Nov 16, 2023 · updated Jul 25, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted as full paper at IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) 2025

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