VIP: A Versatile Inference Processor

We present Versatile Inference Processor (VIP), a highly programmable architecture for machine learning inference. VIP consists of 128 lightweight processing engines employing a vector processing paradigm, with a simple ISA and carefully chosen microarchitecture features. It is coupled with a modern, lightly customized, 3D-stacked memory system. Through detailed execution-driven simulations backed by RTL synthesis, we show that we can achieve online, real-time vision throughput (24 fps), at low power consumption, for both fullHD depth-from-stereo using belief propagation, and VGG-16 and VGG-19 deep neural networks (batch size of 1). Our RTL synthesis of a VIP processing engine in TSMC 28 nm technology, using a commercial standard-cell library supplied by ARM, results in 18 mm2 of silicon area and 3.5 W to 4.8 W of power consumption for all 128 VIP processing engines combined.