TABSH: Tag-based stochastic hardware

Many popular and emerging applications are error tolerant by nature: their operations are considered “correct” even if the underlying hardware, to a certain extent, is erroneous. Under these circumstances, fault-correction mechanisms turn out to be unnecessary. This gave birth to “stochastic processors” that are under-designed and allow results not to be fully correct. Relaxing the hardware correctness requirements as a way to reduce energy consumption is a major trend first because of the emergence of green electronics and second the boom in portable devices with limited battery capacity. In this paper, we present TABSH, a SIMD Tag-Based Stochastic Hardware, and we compare its energy figures to a SISD processor, and show up to 65% energy saving per instruction.