Approximate computing
Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for energy-efficient and/or high-performance design. It includes a plethora of computation techniques that return a possibly inaccurate result rather than a guaranteed accurate result, and that can be used for applications where an approximate result is sufficient for its purpose. One example of such situation is for a search engine where no exact answer may exist for a certain search query and hence, many answers may be acceptable. Similarly, occasional dropping of some frames in a video application can go undetected due to perceptual limitations of humans. Approximate computing is based on the observation that in many scenarios, although performing exact computation requires large amount of resources, allowing bounded approximation can provide disproportionate gains in performance and energy, while still achieving acceptable result accuracy. For example, in k-means clustering algorithm, allowing only 5% loss in classification accuracy can provide 50 times energy saving compared to the fully accurate classification.
The key requirement in approximate computing is that approximation can be introduced only in non-critical data, since approximating critical data can lead to disastrous consequences, such as program crash or erroneous output.
Strategies
Several strategies can be used for performing approximate computing.; Approximate circuits
; Approximate storage and memory
; Software-level approximation
; Approximate system
Application areas
Approximate computing has been used in a variety of domains where the applications are error-tolerant, such as multimedia processing, machine learning, signal processing, scientific computing. Therefore, approximate computing is mostly driven by applications that are related to human perception/cognition and have inherent error resilience. Many of these applications are based on statistical or probabilistic computation, such as different approximations can be made to better suit the desired objectives.One notable application in machine learning is that Google is using this approach in their Tensor processing units.