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Open AccessProceedings ArticleDOI

In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit

TLDR
The Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as discussed by the authors is a custom ASIC deployed in datacenters since 2015 that accelerates the inference phase of neural networks (NN) using a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS).
Abstract
Many architects believe that major improvements in cost-energy-performance must now come from domain-specific hardware. This paper evaluates a custom ASIC---called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) --- deployed in datacenters since 2015 that accelerates the inference phase of neural networks (NN). The heart of the TPU is a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS) and a large (28 MiB) software-managed on-chip memory. The TPU's deterministic execution model is a better match to the 99th-percentile response-time requirement of our NN applications than are the time-varying optimizations of CPUs and GPUs that help average throughput more than guaranteed latency. The lack of such features helps explain why, despite having myriad MACs and a big memory, the TPU is relatively small and low power. We compare the TPU to a server-class Intel Haswell CPU and an Nvidia K80 GPU, which are contemporaries deployed in the same datacenters. Our workload, written in the high-level TensorFlow framework, uses production NN applications (MLPs, CNNs, and LSTMs) that represent 95% of our datacenters' NN inference demand. Despite low utilization for some applications, the TPU is on average about 15X -- 30X faster than its contemporary GPU or CPU, with TOPS/Watt about 30X -- 80X higher. Moreover, using the CPU's GDDR5 memory in the TPU would triple achieved TOPS and raise TOPS/Watt to nearly 70X the GPU and 200X the CPU.

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Citations
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Proceedings ArticleDOI

SIGMA: A Sparse and Irregular GEMM Accelerator with Flexible Interconnects for DNN Training

TL;DR: SIGMA is proposed, a flexible and scalable architecture that offers high utilization of all its processing elements (PEs) regardless of kernel shape and sparsity, and includes a novel reduction tree microarchitecture named Forwarding Adder Network (FAN).
Journal ArticleDOI

Pruning and quantization for deep neural network acceleration: A survey

TL;DR: A survey on two types of network compression: pruning and quantization is provided, which compare current techniques, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, provide guidance for compressing networks, and discuss possible future compression techniques.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

DNNBuilder: an automated tool for building high-performance DNN hardware accelerators for FPGAs

TL;DR: DNNBuilder, an automatic design space exploration tool to generate optimized parallelism guidelines by considering external memory access bandwidth, data reuse behaviors, FPGA resource availability, and DNN complexity, is designed and demonstrated.
Journal ArticleDOI

NullHop: A Flexible Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on Sparse Representations of Feature Maps

TL;DR: In this article, the sparsity of neuron activations in CNNs is exploited to accelerate the computation and reduce memory requirements for low-power and low-latency application scenarios.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Simba: Scaling Deep-Learning Inference with Multi-Chip-Module-Based Architecture

TL;DR: This work investigates and quantifies the costs and benefits of using MCMs with fine-grained chiplets for deep learning inference, an application area with large compute and on-chip storage requirements, and introduces three tiling optimizations that improve data locality.
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