Arbitrary Reduced Precision for Fine-grained Accuracy and Energy Trade-offs

Full-precision Floating-Point Units (FPUs) can be a source of extensive hardware overhead (power consumption, area, memory footprint, etc.). As several modern applications feature an inherent tolerance to precision loss, a new computing paradigm has emerged: Transprecision Computing (TC). TC proposes several tools and techniques that trade precision for energy efficiency. However, most of these tools require developers to rewrite part or all of their existing software stacks, which is often infeasible, complex, or requires extensive development efforts. In addition to their intrusiveness, TC tools can only simulate the impact of precision loss, and they do not provide corresponding hardware designs that take advantage of the simulations.