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Currently, data-intensive applications are gaining popularity. Together with this trend, processing-in-memory (PIM)-based systems are being given more attention and have become more relevant. This article describes an analytical modeling tool called Bitlet that can be used in a parameterized fashion to estimate the performance and power/energy of a PIM-based system and, thereby, assess the affinity of workloads for PIM as opposed to traditional computing. The tool uncovers interesting trade-offs between, mainly, the PIM computation complexity (cycles required to perform a computation through PIM), the amount of memory used for PIM, the system memory bandwidth, and the data transfer size. Despite its simplicity, the model reveals new insights when applied to real-life examples. The model is demonstrated for several synthetic examples and then applied to explore the influence of different parameters on two systems -- IMAGING and FloatPIM. Based on the demonstrations, insights about PIM and its combination with a CPU are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computationally intensive neural network applications often need to run on resource-limited low-power devices. Numerous hardware accelerators have been developed to speed up the performance of neural network applications and reduce power consumption; however, most focus on data centers and full-fledged systems. Acceleration in ultra-low-power systems has been only partially addressed. In this article, we present multiPULPly, an accelerator that integrates memristive technologies within standard low-power CMOS technology, to accelerate multiplication in neural network inference on ultra-low-power systems. This accelerator was designated for PULP, an open-source microcontroller system that uses low-power RISC-V processors. Memristors were integrated into the accelerator to enable power consumption only when the memory is active, to continue the task with no context-restoring overhead, and to enable highly parallel analog multiplication. To reduce the energy consumption, we propose novel dataflows that handle common multiplication scenarios and are tailored for our architecture. The accelerator was tested on FPGA and achieved a peak energy efficiency of 19.5 TOPS/W, outperforming state-of-the-art accelerators by 1.5× to 4.5×. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]