Exploiting Neural-Network Statistics for Low-Power DNN Inference
Lennart Bamberg Ardalan Najafi Alberto Garcia-Ortiz
Specialized compute blocks have been developed for efficient DNN execution.
However, due to the vast amount of data and parameter movements, the
interconnects and on-chip memories form another bottleneck, impairing power and
performance. This work addresses this bottleneck by contributing a low-power
technique for edge-AI inference engines that combines overhead-free coding with
a statistical analysis of the data and parameters of neural networks. Our
approach reduces the interconnect and memory power consumption by up to 80% for
state-of-the-art benchmarks while providing additional power savings for the
compute blocks by up to 39%. These power improvements are achieved with no loss
of accuracy and negligible hardware cost.