Tuesday, June 9, 2020

AI-PiM – PiM accelerators for AI applications for RISC-V



(Vaibhav Varma, UVA, presenting on Wed. 6/17/2020)
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have emerged as the fastest growing workloads in the last few years ranging from applications like object detection and face recognition to self-driving smart cars. This rise in AI applications combined with IoT infrastructure is leading to a new paradigm of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) where IoT edge devices are augmented with AI/ML capabilities to enable smart sensing applications. This has fuelled an increased interest towards integrating AI accelerators in edge devices and Processing-in-Memory (PiM) accelerators are prime candidates for this integration. PiM accelerators promise improved performance and power characteristics by breaking the memory wall but they are notoriously difficult to program which resists their integration in the traditional computing stack. In this talk, we present AI-PiM as a solution to this problem. AI-PiM is a hardware/software codesign methodology which helps with efficient integration of PiM accelerators in the RISC-V processor pipeline as functional units. Along with hardware integration, AI-PiM also focusses on RISC-V ISA extensions which target the PiM functional units directly, resulting in a tight integration of PiM accelerators with the processor.