Flexible accelerator for sparse tensors in convolutional neural networks

• Main Authors: Kulkarni, Anand, Bandic, Zvonimir, Gunnam, Kiran
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 24.10.2023
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTER SYSTEMS BASED ON SPECIFIC COMPUTATIONAL MODELS; COMPUTING; COUNTING; PHYSICS

An apparatus includes a tensor compute cluster having a plurality of tensor compute units to process a plurality of sub-feature maps in a machine learning application and a tensor memory cluster having a plurality of tensor feature map memory units to store the plurality of sub-feature maps. The apparatus also includes circuitry to partition an input feature map into the plurality of sub-feature maps such that sparsity in each of the plurality of sub-feature maps satisfies a predetermined threshold, and assign each of the plurality of sub-feature maps to one of the plurality of tensor compute units and one of the plurality of tensor feature map memory units for processing in parallel.