The slowdown of Moore's law and the power wall necessitates a shift toward finely tunable precision (a.k.a.Transprecision) computing to reduce energy footprint. Hence, we need circuits capable of performing floating-point operations on a wide range of precisions with high energy proportionality. We present FPnew, a highly configurable open-source transprecision floating-point unit (TP-FPU), capable of supporting a wide range of standard and custom FP formats. To demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of FPnew in general-purpose processor architectures, we extend the RISC-V ISA with operations on half-precision, bfloat16, and an 8-bit FP format, as well as SIMD vectors and multiformat operations. Integrated into a 32-bit RISC-V core, our TP-FPU can speedup the execution of mixed-precision applications by 1.67 imes with respect to an FP32 baseline, while maintaining end-To-end precision and reducing system energy by 37%. We also integrate FPnew into a 64-bit RISC-V core, supporting five FP formats on scalars or 2, 4, or 8-way SIMD vectors. For this core, we measured the silicon manufactured in Globalfoundries 22FDX technology across a wide voltage range from 0.45 to 1.2 V. The unit achieves leading-edge measured energy efficiencies between 178 Gflop/sW (on FP64) and 2.95 Tflop/sW (on 8-bit mini-floats), and a performance between 3.2 and 25.3 Gflop/s.

Mach S., Schuiki F., Zaruba F., Benini L. (2021). FPnew: An Open-Source Multiformat Floating-Point Unit Architecture for Energy-Proportional Transprecision Computing. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, 29(4), 774-787 [10.1109/TVLSI.2020.3044752].

FPnew: An Open-Source Multiformat Floating-Point Unit Architecture for Energy-Proportional Transprecision Computing

Benini L.
2021

Abstract

The slowdown of Moore's law and the power wall necessitates a shift toward finely tunable precision (a.k.a.Transprecision) computing to reduce energy footprint. Hence, we need circuits capable of performing floating-point operations on a wide range of precisions with high energy proportionality. We present FPnew, a highly configurable open-source transprecision floating-point unit (TP-FPU), capable of supporting a wide range of standard and custom FP formats. To demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of FPnew in general-purpose processor architectures, we extend the RISC-V ISA with operations on half-precision, bfloat16, and an 8-bit FP format, as well as SIMD vectors and multiformat operations. Integrated into a 32-bit RISC-V core, our TP-FPU can speedup the execution of mixed-precision applications by 1.67 imes with respect to an FP32 baseline, while maintaining end-To-end precision and reducing system energy by 37%. We also integrate FPnew into a 64-bit RISC-V core, supporting five FP formats on scalars or 2, 4, or 8-way SIMD vectors. For this core, we measured the silicon manufactured in Globalfoundries 22FDX technology across a wide voltage range from 0.45 to 1.2 V. The unit achieves leading-edge measured energy efficiencies between 178 Gflop/sW (on FP64) and 2.95 Tflop/sW (on 8-bit mini-floats), and a performance between 3.2 and 25.3 Gflop/s.
2021
Mach S., Schuiki F., Zaruba F., Benini L. (2021). FPnew: An Open-Source Multiformat Floating-Point Unit Architecture for Energy-Proportional Transprecision Computing. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, 29(4), 774-787 [10.1109/TVLSI.2020.3044752].
Mach S.; Schuiki F.; Zaruba F.; Benini L.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/859958
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