Intel Corporation
SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CHANNEL-SEPARABLE OPERATIONS IN DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS

Abstract:

An DNN accelerator includes a column of PEs and an external adder assembly for performing depthwise convolution. Each PE includes register files, multipliers, and an internal adder assembly. Each register file can store an operand (input operand, weight operand, etc.) of the depthwise convolution. The operand includes a sequence of elements, each of which corresponds to a different depthwise channel. A multiplier can perform a sequence of multiplications on two operands, e.g., an input operand and a weight operand, and generate a product operand. The internal adder assembly can accumulate product operands and generate an output operand of the PE. The output operand includes output elements, each of which corresponds to a different depthwise channel. The operands may be reused in different rounds of operations by the multipliers. The external adder assembly can accumulate output operands of multiple PEs and generate an output operand of the PE column.