Tandem Processor: Grappling with Emerging Operators in Neural Networks
Soroush Ghodrati, Sean Kinzer, Hanyang Xu, Rohan Mahapatra, Yoonsung Kim, Byung Hoon Ahn, Dong Kai Wang, Lavanya Karthikeyan, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Jongse Park, Nam Sung Kim, Hadi Esmaeilzadeh
Abstract
With the ever increasing prevalence of neural networks and the upheaval from the language models, it is time to rethink neural acceleration. Up to this point, the broader research community, including ourselves, has disproportionately focused on GEneral Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) operations. The supporting argument was that the large majority of the neural operations are GEMM. This argument guided the research in Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for the last decade. However, scant attention was paid to non-GEMM operations and they are rather overlooked. As deep learning evolved and progressed, these operations have grown in diversity and also large variety of structural patterns have emerged that interweave them with the GEMM operations. However, conventional NPU designs have taken rather simplistic approaches by supporting these operations through either a number of dedicated blocks or fall back to general-purpose processors.