A 3 TOPS/W RISC-V Parallel Cluster for Inference of Fine-Grain Mixed-Precision Quantized Neural Networks

The emerging trend of deploying complex algorithms, such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), increasingly poses strict memory and energy efficiency requirements on Internet-of-Things (IoT) end-nodes. Mixed-precision quantization has been proposed as a technique to minimize a DNN's memory footprint and maximize its execution efficiency, with negligible end-to-end precision degradation. In this work, we present a novel hardware and software stack for energy-efficient inference of mixed-precision Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs). We introduce Flex-V, a processor based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that features fused Mac&Load mixed-precision dot product instructions; to avoid the exponential growth of the encoding space due to mixed-precision variants, we encode formats into the Control-Status Registers (CSRs). Flex-V core is integrated into a tightly-coupled cluster of eight processors; in addition, we provide a full framework for the end-to-end deployment of DNNs including a compiler, optimized libraries, and a memory-aware deployment flow. Our results show up to 91.5 MAC/cycle and 3.26 TOPS/W on the cluster, implemented in a commercial 22nm FDX technology, with up to 8.5x speed-up, and an area overhead of only 5.6% with respect to the baseline. To demonstrate the capabilities of the architecture, we benchmark it with end-to-end real-life QNNs, improving performance by 2x - 2.5x with respect to existing solutions using fully flexible programmable processors.