Tunable Floating-Point for Energy Efficient Accelerators

Abstract

In this work, we address the design of an on-chip accelerator for Machine Learning and other computation-demanding applications with a Tunable Floating-Point (TFP) precision. The precision can be chosen for a single operation by selecting a specific number of bits for significand and exponent in the floating-point representation. By tuning the precision of a given algorithm to the minimum precision achieving an acceptable target error, we can make the computation more power efficient. We focus on floating-point multiplication, which is the most power demanding arithmetic operation.