FEATHER: A Reconfigurable Accelerator with Data Reordering Support for Low-Cost On-Chip Dataflow Switching
For ML accelerator designers, FEATHER provides a practical solution to exploit per-layer optimal dataflows without significant hardware overhead, addressing a key bottleneck in achieving high performance across diverse neural network layers.
FEATHER is a reconfigurable accelerator that enables low-cost on-chip dataflow switching via a novel spatial array (Nest) and multi-stage reduction network (BIRRD), achieving 1.27–2.89x latency speedup and 1.3–6.43x energy efficiency improvement over state-of-the-art accelerators like NVDLA, SIGMA, and Eyeriss on ResNet-50 and MobileNet-V3, with only 6% area overhead.
The inference of ML models composed of diverse structures, types, and sizes boils down to the execution of different dataflows (i.e. different tiling, ordering, parallelism, and shapes). Using the optimal dataflow for every layer of workload can reduce latency by up to two orders of magnitude over a suboptimal dataflow. Unfortunately, reconfiguring hardware for different dataflows involves on-chip data layout reordering and datapath reconfigurations, leading to non-trivial overhead that hinders ML accelerators from exploiting different dataflows, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we propose FEATHER, an innovative accelerator that leverages a novel spatial array termed Nest and a novel multi-stage reduction network called BIRRD for performing flexible data reduction with layout reordering under the hood, enabling seamless switching between optimal dataflows with negligible latency and resources overhead. For systematically evaluating the performance interaction between dataflows and layouts, we enhance Timeloop, a state-of-the-art dataflow cost modeling and search framework, with layout assessment capabilities, and term it as Layoutloop. We model FEATHER into Layoutloop and also deploy FEATHER end-to-end on the edge ZCU104 FPGA. FEATHER delivers 1.27~2.89x inference latency speedup and 1.3~6.43x energy efficiency improvement compared to various SoTAs like NVDLA, SIGMA and Eyeriss under ResNet-50 and MobiletNet-V3 in Layoutloop. On practical FPGA devices, FEATHER achieves 2.65/3.91x higher throughput than Xilinx DPU/Gemmini. Remarkably, such performance and energy efficiency enhancements come at only 6% area over a fixed-dataflow Eyeriss-like accelerator. Our code is released at https://github.com/maeri-project/FEATHER.