Domino: A Tailored Network-on-Chip Architecture to Enable Highly Localized Inter- and Intra-Memory DNN Computing

Abstract: The ever-increasing computation complexity of fast-growing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has requested new computing paradigms to overcome the memory wall in conventional Von Neumann computing architectures. The emerging Computing-In-Memory (CIM) architecture has been a promising candidate to accelerate neural network computing. However, the data movement between CIM arrays may still dominate the total power consumption in conventional designs. This paper proposes a flexible CIM processor architecture named Domino to enable stream computing and local data access to significantly reduce the data movement energy. Meanwhile, Domino employs tailored distributed instruction scheduling within Network-on-Chip (NoC) to implement inter-memory-computing and attain mapping flexibility. The evaluation with prevailing CNN models shows that Domino achieves 1.15-to-9.49$\times$ power efficiency over several state-of-the-art CIM accelerators and improves the throughput by 1.57-to-12.96$\times$.