Title: An OpenCL(TM) Deep Learning Accelerator on Arria 10,
Abstract: Convolutional neural nets (CNNs) have become a practical means to perform
vision tasks, particularly in the area of image classification. FPGAs are well
known to be able to perform convolutions efficiently, however, most recent
efforts to run CNNs on FPGAs have shown limited advantages over other devices
such as GPUs. Previous approaches on FPGAs have often been memory bound due to
the limited external memory bandwidth on the FPGA device. We show a novel
architecture written in OpenCL(TM), which we refer to as a Deep Learning
Accelerator (DLA), that maximizes data reuse and minimizes external memory
bandwidth. Furthermore, we show how we can use the Winograd transform to
significantly boost the performance of the FPGA. As a result, when running our
DLA on Intel's Arria 10 device we can achieve a performance of 1020 img/s, or
23 img/s/W when running the AlexNet CNN benchmark. This comes to 1382 GFLOPs
and is 10x faster with 8.4x more GFLOPS and 5.8x better efficiency than the
state-of-the-art on FPGAs. Additionally, 23 img/s/W is competitive against the
best publicly known implementation of AlexNet on nVidia's TitanX GPU.