xTern: Energy-Efficient Ternary Neural Network Inference on RISC-V-Based Edge Systems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19065v1
• Date: Wed, 29 May 2024 13:16:46 GMT
• Title: xTern: Energy-Efficient Ternary Neural Network Inference on RISC-V-Based Edge Systems
• Abstract summary: Ternary neural networks (TNNs) offer a superior accuracy-energy trade-off compared to binary neural networks. We present xTern, a lightweight extension of the RISC-V instruction set architecture targeted at accelerating TNN inference on general-purpose cores. Our results show that xTern enables RISC-V-based ultra-low-power edge AI platforms to benefit from the efficiency potential of TNNs.
• Score: 11.488297094967377
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Ternary neural networks (TNNs) offer a superior accuracy-energy trade-off compared to binary neural networks. However, until now, they have required specialized accelerators to realize their efficiency potential, which has hindered widespread adoption. To address this, we present xTern, a lightweight extension of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) targeted at accelerating TNN inference on general-purpose cores. To complement the ISA extension, we developed a set of optimized kernels leveraging xTern, achieving 67% higher throughput than their 2-bit equivalents. Power consumption is only marginally increased by 5.2%, resulting in an energy efficiency improvement by 57.1%. We demonstrate that the proposed xTern extension, integrated into an octa-core compute cluster, incurs a minimal silicon area overhead of 0.9% with no impact on timing. In end-to-end benchmarks, we demonstrate that xTern enables the deployment of TNNs achieving up to 1.6 percentage points higher CIFAR-10 classification accuracy than 2-bit networks at equal inference latency. Our results show that xTern enables RISC-V-based ultra-low-power edge AI platforms to benefit from the efficiency potential of TNNs.

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