Reducing power consumption in integrated circuits
AssigneeAmazon Technologies, Inc.
InventorsPaul Gilbert Meyer, Sundeep Amirineni, Ron Diamant
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Techniques for replacing input values being loaded into a computational circuit are described. Small input values such as denormal numbers can be replaced with alternative values such as zeros to reduce switching activity in the computational circuit, and thus reduce power consumption. In applications such as most neural networks, the impact on the prediction results when replacing small numbers with zeros can be negligible. In applications where high precision computations may be desirable, the input values can be loaded into the computation circuit without modification.
Claims24
An integrated circuit device comprising:
- a filter circuit comprising:
- a selection circuit operable to select between an input value and an alternative value;
- and
- logic circuitry operable to perform a bitwise AND operation on a configurable bit mask and the input value to generate a masked value, and to perform a NOR operation on bits of the masked value to generate a select signal to control the selection circuit;
- and
- a computational circuit operable to perform a computation on an output of the filter circuit.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.