Hardware/Software Codesign for Energy Efficiency and Robustness: From Error-Tolerant Computing to Approximate Computing

Abstract

AbstractVoltage scaling, as the most important knob for energy efficiency, is limited by leakage and variability. Variability is arisen from various sources including static manufacturing process, dynamic voltage and temperature fluctuations, and temporal changes over time. To address these variations, designers resort to excessive margins. These margins are increasing rapidly and eventually obliterating any gains due to device scaling. As a consequence, reduction of margins in design has become an important research challenge. We demonstrate how to recover part of these margins through hardware/software codesign with examples in many-core GPUs and FPGAs. This naturally leads to a departure from traditional error-tolerant computing to approximate computing.