Application Specific Instruction-Set Processors for Machine Learning Applications

Abstract

Machine learning algorithms are becoming more complicated with time in order to solve complex problems. This is creating a gap for embedded system solutions e.g. General-Purpose Processors (GPPs), Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), and hardware accelerators, for the machine learning algorithms. To bridge the gap between the available solutions, Application Specific Instruction-set Processors (ASIPs) are a promising solution. ASIPs are processor designs with a tailored architecture for a specific application. This allows a better efficiency (performance-to-power) ratio for the application ex-ecution. Furthermore, it adds more flexibility to the system as compared with hardware accelerators. The scope of this Ph. D. work is to develop a RISC-V-based ASIP for machine learning applications and explore the design space of the optimizations. RISC-V is an open-source Instruction-Set-Architecture (ISA) and allows the addition of custom application-specific instructions to the ISA. In the scope of this work three main design space optimization of ASIPs will be explored; specialized application-specific ISA, vector processing (for data-level parallelism), and multi-core architecture (for task-level parallelism). RISC- V 32-bit architecture is used as the base platform. For vector processing, RISC- V V-extension is utilized for a SIMD-based architecture called Vector Processing Unit (VPU) which is coupled with a 32-bit RISC- V host CPU. A modular memory system is implemented to have a shared (bus-based) and distributed (NoC- based) multi-core system. The memory system increases the flexibility and scalability of the system. Other known machine learning platforms are also explored and used as a comparison case.