Multiple-base Logarithmic Quantization and Application in Reduced Precision AI Computations

The power of logarithmic quantizations and computations has been recognized as a useful tool in optimizing the performance of large ML models. In this article, we provide results that demonstrate significantly better quantization signal-to-noise ratio performance thanks to multiple-base logarithmic number systems (MDLNS) in comparison with the floatingpoint quantizations that use the same number of bits. On a hardware level, we present details about our Xilinx VCU-128 FPGA design for dot product and matrixvector computations. The MDLNS matrix-vector design significantly outperforms equivalent fixed-point binary designs in terms of area (A) and time (T) complexity and power consumption as evidenced by a 4× scaling of AT
²
metric for VLSI performance, and 57% increase in computational throughput per watt compared to fixed-point arithmetic.