Approximate On-The-Fly Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Acceleration for General-Purpose Applications

Approximate functional unit designs have the potential to reduce power consumption significantly compared to their precise counterparts; however, few works have investigated composing them to build generic accelerators. In this work, we do a design-space exploration of state-of-the-art approximate designs, propose a flow for designing approximate coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs), and discuss compilation and runtime reconfiguration issues. We compare the energy savings of precise and approximate reconfigurable acceleration and show that the latter can provide up to 50% additional power savings under a 10% quality loss constraint for the applications in the AxBench suite.