Next Generation Arithmetic for Edge Computing
Andre Guntoro1,a, Cecilia De La Parra1,b, Farhad Merchant2,c, Florent De Dinechin3, John L. Gustafson4, Martin Langhammer5, Rainer Leupers2,d and Sangeeth Nambiar6
1Corporate Research, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany
aAndre.Guntoro@de.bosch.com
bCecilia.DeLaParra@de.bosch.com
2Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
cfarhad.merchant@ice.rwth-aachen.de
dleupers@ice.rwth-aachen.de
3Univ Lyon, INSA Lyon, Inria, CITI
Florent.de-Dinechin@insa-lyon.fr
4National University of Singapore, Singapore
john.gustafson@nus.edu.sg
5Intel Corporation
martin.langhammer@intel.com
6Bosch Research and Technology Centre - India, Bangalore
Sangeeth.Nambiar@in.bosch.com
ABSTRACT
Arithmetic is a key component and is ubiquitous in today’s digital world, ranging from embedded to highperformance computing systems. With machine learning at the fore in a wide range of application domains from wearables to automotive to avionics to weather prediction, sufficiently accurate yet low-cost arithmetic is the need for the day. Recently, there have been several advances in the domain of computer arithmetic, which includes high-precision anchored numbers from ARM, posit arithmetic, bfloat16, etc. as an alternative to IEEE 754- 2008 compliant arithmetic. Optimizations on fixed-point and integer arithmetic are also being pursued actively for low-power computing architectures. Furthermore, approximate computing and transprecision/mixed-precision computing have been exciting areas of research forever. While academic research in the domain of computer arithmetic has a long history, industrial adoption of some of these new data types and techniques is in its early stages and expected to increase in the future. bfloat16 is an excellent example for this. In this paper, we bring academia and industry together to discuss the latest results and future directions for research in the domain of next-generation computer arithmetic, especially for edge computing.
Keywords: Computer Arithmetic, Floating Point Arithmetic, Mixed-Precision Arithmetic, IEEE 754-2008 Standard
