Intel's Deep Learning Boost (DL Boost) is a marketing name for
instruction set architecture
In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ' ...
features on the
x86-64 designed to improve performance on
deep learning
Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
De ...
tasks such as training and inference. DL Boost consists of two sets of features:
*
AVX-512 VNNI, 4VNNIW, or
AVX-VNNI: fast multiply-accumulation mainly for
convolutional neural networks.
* AVX-512 BF16: lower-precision
bfloat16 floating-point numbers for generally faster computation. Operations provided include conversion to/from float32 and dot product.
DL Boost features were introduced in the
Cascade Lake architecture.
A
TensorFlow-based benchmark run on the
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside ...
Compute Engine shows improved performance and reduced cost compared to previous CPUs and to GPUs, especially for small batch sizes.
[Samantha Gurriero, "Machine Learning Optimisation: What is the Best Hardware on GCP?", ''Datatonic'']
/ref>
External links
Deep Learning Boost
at Intel
* Andres Rodrigues et al., "Lower Numerical Precision Deep Learning Inference and Training", Intel White pape
Intel and ML
(2017), from Intel's Developer Relations Division
Notes
SIMD computing
Deep learning
X86 architecture
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