Efficient Emulation of Floating-Point Arithmetic on Fixed-Point SIMD Processors

Gerlach, Lukas; Payá-Vayá, Guillermo; Blume, Holger

doi:10.1109/sips.2016.52

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 9 publications

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“…Some operations on custom formats are slower, since the library executes all the computations in software. This issue can be solved by using acceleration techniques based on SIMD integer units [46]. However the use of a new FP format requires to deeply modify the library sources, while FlexFloat allows to describe any format by invoking an API function to initialize the variable format.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

FlexFloat: A Software Library for Transprecision Computing

Tagliavini

Marongiu

Benini

2020

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

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In recent years approximate computing has been extensively explored as a paradigm to design hardware and software solutions that save energy by trading off on the quality of the computed results. In applications that involve numerical computations with wide dynamic range, precision tuning of floating-point (FP) variables is a key knob to leverage the energy/quality trade-off of program results. This aspect assumes maximum relevance in the transprecision computing scenario, where accuracy of data is tuned at fine grain in application code. Performing precision tuning at fine grain requires a software development flow that streamlines the assessment of which variables have "precision slack" within an application. In this paper we introduce FlexFloat, an open-source software library that has been expressly designed to aid the development of transprecision applications. FlexFloat provides a C/C++ interface for supporting multiple FP formats. Unlike alternative libraries, FlexFloat enables to control the bit-width of mantissa and exponent fields and provides advanced features for the collection of runtime statistics, reducing the FP emulation time compared to the state-of-the-art solutions. Its design allows to emulate the behavior of standard IEEE FP types and custom extensions for reduced-precision computation. This makes the library suitable for adoption in multiple contexts, from manual exploration to integration into automatic tools. Experimental findings demonstrate that our approach can be used to perform a complete precision analysis from which deriving multiple program versions depending on the energy/quality trade-off. Furthermore, we show that the adoption of our methodology can lead to a significant reduction of energy consumption even on current commercial hardware (an embedded GPGPU).

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

FlexFloat: A Software Library for Transprecision Computing

Tagliavini

Marongiu

Benini

2020

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

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Low-Precision Floating-Point Formats: From General-Purpose to Application-Specific

Molahosseini

Sousa

Zarandi

et al. 2012

Approximate Computing

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A Survey on Application Specific Processor Architectures for Digital Hearing Aids

Gerlach

Payá-Vayá

Blume

2021

J Sign Process Syst

Self Cite

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On the one hand, processors for hearing aids are highly specialized for audio processing, on the other hand they have to meet challenging hardware restrictions. This paper aims to provide an overview of the requirements, architectures, and implementations of these processors. Special attention is given to the increasingly common application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs). The main focus of this paper lies on hardware-related aspects such as the processor architecture, the interfaces, the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology, and the operating conditions. The different hearing aid implementations are compared in terms of power consumption, silicon area, and computing performance for the algorithms used. Challenges for the design of future hearing aid processors are discussed based on current trends and developments.

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Efficient Emulation of Floating-Point Arithmetic on Fixed-Point SIMD Processors

Cited by 6 publications

References 9 publications

FlexFloat: A Software Library for Transprecision Computing

FlexFloat: A Software Library for Transprecision Computing

Low-Precision Floating-Point Formats: From General-Purpose to Application-Specific

A Survey on Application Specific Processor Architectures for Digital Hearing Aids

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