ShapeShifter
Alberto Delmás Lascorz, Sayeh Sharify, Isak Edo, Dylan Malone Stuart, Omar Mohamed Awad, Patrick Judd, Mostafa Mahmoud, Miloš Nikolić, Kevin Siu, Zissis Poulos, Andreas Moshovos · 2019
We show that selecting a data width for all values in Deep Neural Networks, quantized or not and even if that width is different per layer, amounts to worst-case design. Much shorter data widths can be used if we target the common case by adjusting the data type width at a much finer granularity. We propose ShapeShifter, where we group weights and activations and encode them using a width specific to each group and where typical group sizes vary from 16 to 256 values. The per group widths are selected statically for the weights and dynamically by hardware for the activations. We present two applications of ShapeShifter. In the first, that is applicable to any system, ShapeShifter reduces off- and on-chip storage and communication. This ShapeShifter-based memory compression is simple and low cost yet reduces off-chip traffic to 33% and 36% for 8-bit and 16-bit models respectively. This makes it possible to sustain higher performance for a given off-chip memory interface while also boosting energy efficiency. In the second application, we show how ShapeShifter can be implemented as a surgical extension over designs that exploit variable precision in time.