Estimate and Recompute: A Novel Paradigm for Approximate Computing on Data Flow Graphs

Approximate computing (AC) is an emerging computation paradigm that utilizes many applications’ intrinsic error resilience to improve power and energy efficiency. Several approaches have been proposed to identify the noncritical computations by analyzing the output sensitivity to the accuracy of the results, and then perform approximation on these computations. However, these static approaches only use the prior knowledge (e.g., input ranges)...