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Also, like, FP tensor cores are way more expensive than fixed-point tensor cores, and with some care, it's very much practical to even train DNNs on them. E.g.
by namibj 3y ago
Also, like, FP tensor cores are way more expensive than fixed-point tensor cores, and with some care, it's very much practical to even train DNNs on them.
E.g. it's common to have a full-width accumulator and e.g. s16 gradients with u8 activations and s8 weights, with the FMA (MAC) chain of the tensor multiply operation post-scaled with a learned u32 factor plus follow-up "learned" notify, which effectively acts as a fixed-point factor with learned position of it's point, to re-scale the outcome to the u8 activation range.
By having the gradients by sufficiently wider, it's practical to use a straight-through estimator for backpropagation.
I read a paper (kinda two, actually) a few months ago that dealt with this (IIRC one of them was more about the hardware/ASIC aspects of fixed-point tensor cores, the other more about model training experiments with existing low precision integer-MAC chips IIRC particularly for interference in mind). If requested, I can probably find it by digging through my system(s); I would have already linked it/them if the cursory search hadn't failed.