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RMAC: Runtime Configurable Floating Point Multiplier for Approximate Computing

Authors:

Ricardo Garcia,

Tajana RosingAuthors Info & Claims

ISLPED '18: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design

Article No.: 12, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/3218603.3218621

Published: 23 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Approximate computing is a way to build fast and energy efficient systems, which provides responses of good enough quality tailored for different purposes. In this paper, we propose a novel approximate floating point multiplier which efficiently multiplies two floating numbers and yields a high precision product. RMAC approximates the costly mantissa multiplication to a simple addition between the mantissa of input operands. To tune the level of accuracy, RMAC looks at the first bit of the input mantissas as well as the first N bits of the result of addition to dynamically estimate the maximum multiplication error rate. Then, RMAC decides to either accept the approximate result or re-execute the exact multiplication. Depending on the value of N, the proposed RMAC can be configured to achieve different levels of accuracy. We integrate the proposed RMAC in AMD southern Island GPU, by replacing RMAC with the existing floating point units. We test the efficiency and accuracy of the enhanced GPU on a wide range of applications including multimedia and machine learning applications. Our evaluations show that a GPU enhanced by the proposed RMAC can achieve 5.2x energydelay product improvement as opposed to GPU using conventional FPUs while ensuring less than 2% quality loss. Comparing our approach with other state-of-the-art approximate multipliers shows that RMAC can achieve 3.1x faster and 1.8x more energy efficient computations while providing the same quality of service.

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Cited By

Niu ZZhang TJiang HCockburn BLiu LHan J(2024)Hardware-Efficient Logarithmic Floating-Point Multipliers for Error-Tolerant ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers10.1109/TCSI.2023.332632971:1(209-222)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSI.2023.3326329
Tegazzini LDi Meo GDe Caro DStrollo A(2024)Design of a Hardware-Efficient Floating-Point Multiplier with Dynamic Segmentation2024 19th Conference on Ph.D Research in Microelectronics and Electronics (PRIME)10.1109/PRIME61930.2024.10559705(1-4)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/PRIME61930.2024.10559705
Yan CChen KLiu W(2024)Design Wireless Communication Circuits and Systems Using Approximate ComputingDesign and Applications of Emerging Computer Systems10.1007/978-3-031-42478-6_20(531-565)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42478-6_20
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Index Terms

RMAC: Runtime Configurable Floating Point Multiplier for Approximate Computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

ISLPED '18: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design

July 2018

327 pages

ISBN:9781450357043

DOI:10.1145/3218603

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 23 July 2018

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ISLPED '18: International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design

July 23 - 25, 2018

WA, Seattle, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 398 of 1,159 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

Niu ZZhang TJiang HCockburn BLiu LHan J(2024)Hardware-Efficient Logarithmic Floating-Point Multipliers for Error-Tolerant ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers10.1109/TCSI.2023.332632971:1(209-222)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSI.2023.3326329
Tegazzini LDi Meo GDe Caro DStrollo A(2024)Design of a Hardware-Efficient Floating-Point Multiplier with Dynamic Segmentation2024 19th Conference on Ph.D Research in Microelectronics and Electronics (PRIME)10.1109/PRIME61930.2024.10559705(1-4)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/PRIME61930.2024.10559705
Yan CChen KLiu W(2024)Design Wireless Communication Circuits and Systems Using Approximate ComputingDesign and Applications of Emerging Computer Systems10.1007/978-3-031-42478-6_20(531-565)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42478-6_20
Wu JHsu TLiu R(2023)SG-Float: Achieving Memory Access and Computing Power Reduction Using Self-Gating Float in CNNsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/362458222:6(1-22)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3624582
Wu YChen CXiao WWang XWen CHan JYin XQian WZhuo C(2023)A Survey on Approximate Multiplier Designs for Energy Efficiency: From Algorithms to CircuitsACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems10.1145/361029129:1(1-37)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610291
Damsgaard HOmetov ANurmi J(2023)Approximation Opportunities in Edge Computing Hardware: A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Computing Surveys10.1145/357277255:12(1-49)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3572772
Raza MJaved SKazmi MAziz AUl Haque MQazi S(2023)Approximate Computing: Hardware and Software Techniques, Tools and Their ApplicationsJournal of Circuits, Systems and Computers10.1142/S021812662430001033:04Online publication date: 20-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218126624300010
Towhidy AOmidi RMohammadi K(2023)On the Design of Iterative Approximate Floating-Point MultipliersIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2022.321646572:6(1623-1635)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2022.3216465
Mishra VMittal SSinghal RNambiar M(2023)Novel, Configurable Approximate Floating-point Multipliers for Error-Resilient Applications2023 24th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED)10.1109/ISQED57927.2023.10129296(1-7)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISQED57927.2023.10129296
Chatzitsompanis GKarakonstantis G(2023)On the Facilitation of Voltage Over-Scaling and Minimization of Timing Errors in Floating-Point Multipliers2023 IEEE 29th International Symposium on On-Line Testing and Robust System Design (IOLTS)10.1109/IOLTS59296.2023.10224887(1-7)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/IOLTS59296.2023.10224887
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