Big-little chiplets for in-memory acceleration of DNNs: A scalable heterogeneous architecture

Monolithic in-memory computing (IMC) architectures face significant yield and fabrication cost challenges as the complexity of DNNs increases. Chiplet-based IMCs that integrate multiple dies with advanced 2.5D/3D packaging offers a low-cost and scalable solution. They enable heterogeneous architectures where the chiplets and their associated interconnection can be tailored to the non-uniform algorithmic structures to maximize IMC utilization and reduce energy consumption. This paper proposes a heterogeneous IMC architecture with big-little chiplets and a hybrid network-on-package (NoP) to optimize the utilization, interconnect bandwidth, and energy efficiency. For a given DNN, we develop a custom methodology to map the model onto the big-little architecture such that the early layers in the DNN are mapped to the little chiplets with higher NoP bandwidth and the subsequent layers are mapped to the big chiplets with lower NoP bandwidth. Furthermore, we achieve a scalable solution by incorporating a DRAM into each chiplet to support a wide range of DNNs beyond the area limit. Compared to a homogeneous chiplet-based IMC architecture, the proposed big-little architecture achieves up to 329× improvement in the energy-delay-area product (EDAP) and up to 2× higher IMC utilization. Experimental evaluation of the proposed big-little chiplet-based RRAM IMC architecture for ResNet-50 on ImageNet shows 259×, 139×, and 48× improvement in energy-efficiency at lower area compared to Nvidia V100 GPU, Nvidia T4 GPU, and SIMBA architecture, respectively.