You Cannot Improve What You Do not Measure
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, deep learning (DL) has become best-in-class for numerous applications but at a high computational cost that necessitates high-performance energy-efficient acceleration. The reconfigurability of FPGAs is appealing due to the rapid change in DL models but also causes lower performance and area-efficiency compared to ASICs. In this article, we implement three state-of-the-art computing architectures (CAs) for convolutional neural network (CNN) inference on FPGAs and ASICs. By comparing the FPGA and ASIC implementations, we highlight the area and performance costs of programmability to pinpoint the inefficiencies in current FPGA architectures. We perform our experiments using three variations of these CAs for AlexNet, VGG-16 and ResNet-50 to allow extensive comparisons. We find that the performance gap varies significantly from 2.8× to 6.3×, while the area gap is consistent across CAs with an 8.7 average FPGA-to-ASIC area ratio. Among different blocks of the CAs, the convolution engine, constituting up to 60% of the total area, has a high area ratio ranging from 13 to 31. Motivated by our FPGA vs. ASIC comparisons, we suggest FPGA architectural changes such as increasing DSP block count, enhancing low-precision support in DSP blocks and rethinking the on-chip memories to reduce the programmability gap for DL applications.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it