Accelerating Deep Convolutional Networks using low-precision and sparsity

We explore techniques to significantly improve the compute efficiency and performance of Deep Convolution Networks without impacting their accuracy. To improve the compute efficiency, we focus on achieving high accuracy with extremely low-precision (2-bit) weight networks, and to accelerate the execution time, we aggressively skip operations on zero-values. We achieve the highest reported accuracy of 76.6% Top-1/93% Top-5 on the Imagenet object classification challenge with low-precision network while reducing the compute requirement by ∼3× compared to a full-precision network that achieves similar accuracy. Furthermore, to fully exploit the benefits of our low-precision networks, we build a deep learning accelerator core, DLAC, that can achieve up to 1 TFLOP/mm2 equivalent for single-precision floating-point operations (∼2 TFLOP/mm2 for half-precision), which is ∼5× better than Linear Algebra Core [16] and ∼4× better than previous deep learning accelerator proposal [8].