Improving efficiency in neural network accelerator using operands hamming distance optimization

Abstract

Neural network accelerator is a key enabler for the on-device AI inference, for which energy efficiency is an important metric. The datapath energy, including the computation energy and the data movement energy among the arithmetic units, claims a significant part of the total accelerator energy. By revisiting the basic physics of the arithmetic logic circuits, we show that the datapath energy is highly correlated with the bit flips when streaming the input operands into the arithmetic units, defined as the hamming distance of the input operand matrices. Based on the insight, we propose a post-training optimization algorithm and a hamming-distance-aware training algorithm to co-design and co-optimize the accelerator and the network synergistically. The experimental results based on post-layout simulation with MobileNetV2 demonstrate on average 2.85× datapath energy reduction and up to 8.51× datapath energy reduction for certain layers.