Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a circuit technology that will improve the energy efficiency of hardware used for deep learning without changing network structures or gaining algorithms.



Fujitsu AI 01 (cr) Figure 1: Improving calculation accuracy in the computational core (Source: Fujitsu)



The newly developed circuit technology improves energy efficiency in two ways: First is that power can be reduced by executing operations that were done in floating point as integer calculations, instead. The second way is by reducing data bit width from 32-bit to 16-bit to cut the volume of data being handled in half, meaning that the power consumption of the compute unit and memory can be reduced by about 50%. Moreover, by reducing it to 8-bit, the power consumption of the compute unit and memory can be reduced by about 75%.

Fujitsu AI 02 (cr) Figure 2: Optimising calculation settings using statistical information (Source: Fujitsu)


Fujitsu Laboratories plans to commercialise the circuit technology as part of Human Centric AI Zinrai, Fujitsu Limited's AI technology. It will also continue to develop circuit technology in order to further reduce the data volumes used in deep learning.