The emerging mobile robot industry has spurred a flurry of interest in solving the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. However, existing SLAM platforms have difficulty in meeting the real-time and low-power requirements imposed by mobile systems. Though specialized hardware is promising with regard to achieving high performance and lowering the power, designing an efficient accelerator for SLAM is severely hindered by a wide variety of SLAM algorithms. Based on our detailed analysis of representative SLAM algorithms, we observe that SLAM algorithms advance two challenges for designing efficient hardware accelerators: the large number of computational primitives and irregular control flows. To address these two challenges, we propose a hardware accelerator that features composable computation units classified as the matrix, vector, scalar, and control units. In addition, we design a hierarchical instruction set for coping with a broad range of SLAM algorithms with irregular control flows. Experimental results show that, compared against an Intel x86 processor, on average, our accelerator with the area of 7.41 mm² achieves 10.52x and 112.62x better performance and energy savings, respectively, across different datasets. Compared against a more energy-efficient ARM Cortex processor, our accelerator still achieves 33.03x and 62.64x better performance and energy savings, respectively.

The increasing attention on deep learning has tremendously spurred the design of intelligence processing hardware. The variety of emerging intelligence processors requires standard benchmarks for fair comparison and system optimization (in both software and hardware). However, existing benchmarks are unsuitable for benchmarking intelligence processors due to their non-diversity and nonrepresentativeness. Also, the lack of a standard benchmarking methodology further exacerbates this problem. In this paper, we propose BENCHIP, a benchmark suite and benchmarking methodology for intelligence processors. The benchmark suite in BENCHIP consists of two sets of benchmarks: microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks. The microbenchmarks consist of single-layer networks. They are mainly designed for bottleneck analysis and system optimization. The macrobenchmarks contain state-of-the-art industrial networks, so as to offer a realistic comparison of different platforms. We also propose a standard benchmarking methodology built upon an industrial software stack and evaluation metrics that comprehensively reflect various characteristics of the evaluated intelligence processors. BENCHIP is utilized for evaluating various hardware platforms, including CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators. BENCHIP will be open-sourced soon.