M3FPU: Multiformat Matrix Multiplication FPU Architectures for Neural Network Computations

Parallel computing performance on floating-point numbers is one of the most important factors in modern computer systems. The hardware components of floating-point units have the potential to improve parallel performance and resource utilization, however, the existing vector-type multiformat parallel floating-point units cannot take advantage of them. We propose M3FPU, a new matrix-type multiformat floating-point unit that applies an outer product matrix multiplication method to a multiplier tree of floating-point units to increase parallelism and resource utilization by the square. M3FPU utilizes the unused part of the multiplier tree of the existing floating-point unit that is filled with zeros. The proposed M3FPU is implemented on a 12nm silicon process and achieves a 44.17% smaller area compared to the state-of-the-art multiformat floating-point unit architecture when supporting the same number of 8-bit floating-point number parallel operations.