Data volume sculptor for deep learning acceleration

摘要

Embodiments of a device include on-board memory, an applications processor, a digital signal processor (DSP) cluster, a configurable accelerator framework (CAF), and at least one communication bus architecture. The communication bus communicatively couples the applications processor, the DSP cluster, and the CAF to the on-board memory. The CAF includes a reconfigurable stream switch and a data volume sculpting unit, which has an input and an output coupled to the reconfigurable stream switch. The data volume sculpting unit has a counter, a comparator, and a controller. The data volume sculpting unit is arranged to receive a stream of feature map data that forms a three-dimensional (3D) feature map. The 3D feature map is formed as a plurality of two-dimensional (2D) data planes. The data volume sculpting unit is also arranged to identify a 3D volume within the 3D feature map that is dimensionally smaller than the 3D feature map and isolate data from the 3D feature map that is within the 3D volume for processing in a deep learning algorithm.