Intel's Deep Learning Boost (DL Boost) is a marketing name for
instruction set architecture features on the
x86-64
x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...
designed to improve performance on
deep learning 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 network
In deep learning, a convolutional neural network (CNN, or ConvNet) is a class of artificial neural network (ANN), most commonly applied to analyze visual imagery. CNNs are also known as Shift Invariant or Space Invariant Artificial Neural Netwo ...
s.
* 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
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...
-based benchmark run on the
Google Cloud Platform 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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