A 190GFLOPS/W DSP for energy-efficient sparse-BLAS in embedded IoT

Abstract

A DSP for sparse-BLAS is realized in 40nm CMOS. Featuring an efficient data stream reordering scheme and an intelligent, CSC-aware memory controller, the DSP achieves a peak energy efficiency of 190 GFLOPS/W at 0.6V, 160MHz, and a peak performance of 4.12 GFLOPS at 1V, 515MHz showing more than 6,600×, 2,700×, 1,100×, and 450× higher energy efficiency than state-of-the-art CPU, GPU, DSP, and FPGA hardware designs, respectively.