An artificial neural network accelerator using general purpose 24 bit floating point digital signal processors

An artificial neural network (ANN) accelerator named Neuro Turbo was implemented using four recently developed general-purpose 24-b floating-point digital signal processors (DSP) MB86220. The Neuro Turbo is a MIMD (multiple-instruction, multiple-data) parallel processor having four ring-coupled DSPs and four dual-port memories (DPM). It is designed compactly to plug into the extender slots of the NEC personal computer PC98 series. The performance was evaluated by constructing a neural network to recognize the 26 type fonts of the alphabet set. Processing speeds of 2 MCPS (million connections per second) for the learning procedure and 11 MCPS for the forward pass were achieved.<
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