Industry Expert Blogs

The traditional metrics for evaluating IP are performance, power, and area, commonly abbreviated as PPA. Viewed independently, PPA measures can be difficult to assess. As an example, design constraints that are purely based on performance, without concern for the associated power dissipation and circuit area, are increasingly rare. There is a related set of characteristics of importance, especially given the increasing integration of SoC circuitry associated with deep neural networks (DNN) – namely, the implementation energy and area efficiency, usually represented as a performance per watt measure and a performance per area measure.

The DNN implementation options commonly considered are: a software-programmed (general purpose) microprocessor core, a programmed graphics processing unit (GPU), a field-programmable gate array, and a hard-wired logic block. In 2002, Broderson and Zhang from UC-Berkeley published a Technical Report that described the efficiency of different options, targeting digital signal processing algorithms. [1]

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