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Scalable, Programmable Look-Up Table Based Neural Acceleration (arxiv.org)
3 points by PaulHoule on Jun 15, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of multiplying, the chip looks up pre-computed answers in small tables, splitting big multiplications into smaller ones so tables stay manageable. Against standard digital multiplier hardware, it used 1.23 times less area and 1.80 times less energy per answer, with no accuracy loss.

Abstract · Look-Up Table based Neural Network Hardware

Traditional digital implementations of neural accelerators are limited by high power and area overheads, while analog and non-CMOS implementations suffer from noise, device mismatch, and reliability issues. This paper introduces a CMOS Look-Up Table (LUT)-based Neural Accelerator (LUT-NA) framework that reduces the power, latency, and area consumption of traditional digital accelerators through pre-computed, faster look-ups while avoiding noise and mismatch of analog circuits. To solve the scalability issues of conventional LUT-based computation, we split the high-precision multiply and accumulate (MAC) operations into lower-precision MACs using a divide-and-conquer-based approach. We show that LUT-NA achieves up to $29.54\times$ lower area with $3.34\times$ lower energy per inference task than traditional LUT-based techniques and up to $1.23\times$ lower area with $1.80\times$ lower energy per inference task than conventional digital MAC-based techniques (Wallace Tree/Array Multipliers) without retraining and without affecting accuracy, even on lottery ticket pruned (LTP) models that already reduce the number of required MAC operations by up to 98%. Finally, we introduce mixed precision analysis in LUT-NA framework for various LTP models (VGG11, VGG19, Resnet18, Resnet34, GoogleNet) that achieved up to $32.22\times$-$50.95\times$ lower area across models with $3.68\times$-$6.25\times$ lower energy per inference than traditional LUT-based techniques, and up to $1.35\times$-$2.14\times$ lower area requirement with $1.99\times$-$3.38\times$ lower energy per inference across models as compared to conventional digital MAC-based techniques with $\sim$1% accuracy loss.

Ovishake Sen, Chukwufumnanya Ogbogu, Peyman Dehghanzadeh, Janardhan Rao Doppa, Swarup Bhunia, Partha Pratim Pande, Baibhab Chatterjee
arXiv:2406.05282 · cs.AR · submitted Jun 7, 2024 · updated Sep 30, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 7 pages

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