Dataflow Architecture Optimization for Low-Precision Neural Networks

The execution model of the dataflow architecture is similar to the execution of neural network algorithm, which can exploit more parallelism. However, with the development of low-precision neural networks, the research on dataflow architecture has not been developed for low-precision neural networks. When low-precision (INT8, INT4 or lower) neural networks are deployed in traditional dataflow architectures, they will face the following three challenges: 1) The data path of the traditional dataflow architecture does not match the low-precision data, which cannot reflect the performance and energy efficiency advantages of the low-precision neural networks. 2) Vectorized low-precision data are required to be arranged in order in the on-chip memory, but these data are arranged in a scattered manner in the off-chip memory hierarchy, which makes data loading and writing back operations more complicated. The memory access components of the traditional dataflow architecture cannot support this complex memory access mode efficiently. 3) In traditional dataflow architecture, the double buffering mechanism is used to conceal the transmission delay. However, when low-precision data are transmitted, the utilization of the transmission bandwidth is significantly reduced, resulting in calculation delays that cannot cover the data transmission delay, and the double buffering mechanism faces the risk of failure, thereby affecting the performance and energy efficiency of the dataflow architecture. In order to solve the above problems, we optimize the dataflow architecture and design a low-precision neural networks accelerator named DPU_Q. First of all, a flexible and reconfigurable computing unit is designed, which dynamically reconstructs the data path according to the precision flag of the instruction. On the one hand, it can efficiently and flexibly support a variety of low-precision operations. On the other hand, the performance and throughput of the architecture can be further improved in this way. In addition, in order to solve the complex memory access mode of low-precision data, we design Scatter engine, which can splice and preprocess the low-precision data discretely distributed in the off-chip/low-level memory hierarchy to meet the format requirements of the on-chip/high-level memory hierarchy for data arrangement. At the same time, Scatter engine can effectively solve the problem of reduced bandwidth utilization when transmitting low-precision data. The transmission delay will not increase significantly, so it can be completely covered by the double buffer mechanism. Finally, a low-precision neural network scheduling method is proposed, which can fully reuse weights, activation values, reducing memory access overhead. Experiments show that compared with the same precision GPU (Titan Xp), state-of-the-art dataflow architecture (Eyeriss) and state-of-the-art low-precision neural network accelerator (BitFusion), DPU_Q achieves 3.18 \times , 6.05 \times , and 1.52 \times of performance improvement and 4.49 \times , 1.6 \times , and 1.13 \times of energy efficiency improvement, respectively.