A Customized NoC Architecture to Enable Highly Localized Computing-On-the-Move DNN Dataflow

Abstract

The ever-increasing computation complexity of fastgrowing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has requested new computing paradigms to overcome the memory wall in conventional Von Neumann computing architectures. The emerging Computing-In-Memory (CIM) architecture has been a promising candidate to accelerate neural network computing. However, data movement between CIM arrays may still dominate the total power consumption in conventional designs. This paper proposes a flexible CIM processor architecture named Domino and "Computing-On-the-Move" (COM) dataflow, to enable stream computing and local data access to significantly reduce data movement energy. Meanwhile, Domino employs customized distributed instruction scheduling within Network-on-Chip (NoC) to implement inter-memory computing and attain mapping flexibility. The evaluation with prevailing DNN models shows that Domino achieves 1.77-to-2.37$\times$ power efficiency over several state-of-the-art CIM accelerators and improves the throughput by 1.28-to-13.16$\times$.