A Configurable Floating-Point Multiple-Precision Processing Element for HPC and AI Converged Computing

There is an emerging need to design configurable accelerators for the high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications in different precisions. Thus, the floating-point (FP) processing element (PE), which is the key basic unit of the accelerators, is necessary to meet multiple-precision requirements with energy-efficient operations. However, the existing structures by using high-precision-split (HPS) and low-precision-combination (LPC) methods result in low utilization rate of the multiplication array and long multiterm processing period, respectively. In this article, a configurable FP multiple-precision PE design is proposed with the LPC structure. Half precision, single precision, and double precision are supported. The 100% multiplier utilization rate of the multiplication array for all precisions is achieved with improved speed in the comparison and summation process. The proposed design is realized in a 28-nm process with 1.429-GHz clock frequency. Compared with the existing multiple-precision FP methods, the proposed structure achieves 63% and 88% area-saving performance for FP16 and FP32 operations, respectively. The
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maximum throughput rates are obtained when compared with fixed FP32 and FP64 operations. Compared with the previous multiple-precision PEs, the proposed one achieves the best energy-efficiency performance with 975.13 GFLOPS/W.