Bibliographic record
Abstract
Approximate computing has the potential to improve performance and energy efficiency in high-performance processors. This work focuses on the impact of approximating conventionally non-trivial instructions to trivial instructions. Instructions which do not need to be processed due to the nature of their operands, such as division by 1 or addition with 0 are trivial instructions. By approximating instructions which results in an acceptable level of accuracy in programs' outputs, we can increase the number of trivial instructions and enhance power and performance of trivial bypassing. To approximate integer values, we mask the least significant bits (LSBs) of instructions' operands. The number of masked bits is under the control of programmers. To approximate floating-point values, we propose two different schemes. The first scheme sets a threshold and approximates the values that lie within the threshold region. A 32- or 64-bit comparator, depending on the operand size, is used for comparison between the operand and the threshold. Thus, instructions which would have used the expensive floating-point units are bypassed and only a comparator and a few gates are used instead. The second scheme reduces cost of approximation by replacing full-blown comparators with smaller ones and performing inexact comparisons between the operand and the threshold. Our evaluations using a diverse set of benchmarks reveal that precise comparison and trivial bypassing improve energy-delay by 21% and 13%, respectively while the inexact approximation improves energy-delay by 22%.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".