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Concept
Approximate computing
Résumé
Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for energy-efficient and/or high-performance design. It includes a plethora of computation techniques that return a possibly inaccurate result rather than a guaranteed accurate result, and that can be used for applications where an approximate result is sufficient for its purpose. One example of such situation is for a search engine where no exact answer may exist for a certain search query and hence, many answers may be acceptable. Similarly, occasional dropping of some frames in a video application can go undetected due to perceptual limitations of humans. Approximate computing is based on the observation that in many scenarios, although performing exact computation requires large amount of resources, allowing bounded approximation can provide disproportionate gains in performance and energy, while still achieving acceptable result accuracy. For example, in k-means clustering algorithm, allowing only 5% loss in classification accuracy can provide 50 times energy saving compared to the fully accurate classification.
The key requirement in approximate computing is that approximation can be introduced only in non-critical data, since approximating critical data (e.g., control operations) can lead to disastrous consequences, such as program crash or erroneous output.
Several strategies can be used for performing approximate computing.
Approximate circuits
Approximate arithmetic circuits: adders, multipliers and other logical circuits can reduce hardware overhead. For example, an approximate multi-bit adder can ignore the carry chain and thus, allow all its sub-adders to perform addition operation in parallel.
Approximate storage and memory
Instead of storing data values exactly, they can be stored approximately, e.g., by truncating the lower-bits in floating point data. Another method is to accept less reliable memory. For this, in DRAM and eDRAM, refresh rate assignments can be lowered or controlled. In SRAM, supply voltage can be lowered or controlled.
Source officielle
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