Title
Concise loads and stores: The case for an asymmetric compute-memory architecture for approximation.
Abstract
Cache capacity and memory bandwidth play critical roles in application performance, particularly for data-intensive applications from domains that include machine learning, numerical analysis, and data mining. Many of these applications are also tolerant to imprecise inputs and have loose constraints on the quality of output, making them ideal candidates for approximate computing. This paper introduces a novel approximate computing technique that decouples the format of data in the memory hierarchy from the format of data in the compute subsystem to significantly reduce the cost of storing and moving bits throughout the memory hierarchy and improve application performance. This asymmetric compute-memory extension to conventional architectures, ACME, adds two new instruction classes to the ISA - load-concise and store-concise - along with three small functional units to the micro-architecture to support these instructions. ACME does not affect exact execution of applications and comes into play only when concise memory operations are used. Through detailed experimentation we find that ACME is very effective at trading result accuracy for improved application performance. Our results show that ACME achieves a 1.3X speedup (up to 1.8X) while maintaining 99% accuracy, or a 1.1X speedup while maintaining 99.999% accuracy. Moreover, our approach incurs negligible area and power overheads, adding just 0.005% area and 0.1% power to a conventional modern architecture.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.5555/3195638.3195688
MICRO-49: The 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture Taipei Taiwan October, 2016
Keywords
Field
DocType
asymmetric compute-memory architecture,cache capacity,memory bandwidth,machine learning,numerical analysis,data mining,approximate computing technique,ACME
Memory hierarchy,Memory bandwidth,Address space layout randomization,Computer science,Parallel computing,Timing attack,Real-time computing,Side channel attack,Memory architecture,Speedup,Information and Computer Science
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1072-4451
978-1-4503-4952-9
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
19
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Animesh Jain1201.98
Parker Hill2392.70
Shih-Chieh Lin3332.17
Muneeb Khan4161.24
Md E. Haque5311.81
Michael A. Laurenzano646721.23
Scott Mahlke74811312.08
Lingjia Tang8122946.41
Jason Mars9132849.94