1

Review of Machine Learning And Its

Hardware Platform
Xiaotian Liu

Abstract—As the gordian technique of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning is,by far,the most effective way to make
computer acquire intelligence. In addition to the algorithm, the key to the development of machine learning is to create
corresponding hardwares. And we hope the hardwares should be suitable for the operation mode of Machine Learning
and can be integrated into the algorithm system of Machine Learning. So in this paper, we will talk about how to support
the progress of software and solve several problems about Machine Learning through the development of hardware,
which shows the importance of hardware platform in Machine Learning.

Keywords: Machine Learning; Hardware Platform; GPU; FGPA

1 I NTRODUCTION creating hardwares that can support local Ma-

W ith the development in these years, the
key technologies of Artificial Intelligence
have changed greatly from classical Artificial
Intelligence to Artificial Neural Network. How-
ever, the core idea of Artificial Intelligence al-
ways keeps the same ,which is Machine Learn-
ing.Because of its rapid development in recent
years, Machine Learning has gradually formed
a series of mature and feasible algorithms at
the software level, such as Decision Tree, Clus-
tering, Bayesian Classification, Support Vector
Machine, EM, Adaboost and so on.At the hard-
ware level, current machine learning is mainly
realized by ASIC1 , FPGA2 and GPU3 .
In the era of big data, with such a high speed
of data production and generation, method of
sending original data to the cloud for com-
puting is gradually outdated, and there is an
increasing demand for local analysis and calcu-
lation near sensors.Embedding Machine Learn-
ing on hardware platforms, also solves some
privacy and potential security issues.Therefore,
• Xiaotian Liu is with the Department of Computer Science
and Electronic Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China,
1800012723.
1. ASIC:Application Specific Integrated Circuit
2. FPGA:Field-Programmable Gate Array
3. GPU:Graphics Processing Unit
chine Learning computing becomes a break-
through point in the development of Machine
Learning.
So in this paper,firstly,we will briefly intro-
duce the basic concepts and process of Machine
Learning, then we will introduce several dif-
ficulties encountered by Machine Learning in
hardwares and talk about several corresspod-
ing solutions.
2 BASIC CONCEPTS OF M ACHINE
L EARNING
Machine learning is mainly divided into
four steps, which are obtaining data sources,
data analysis ,feature selection, training and
evaluation of data sets. Details are shown in
the Table 1:
Table 1:Four steps of machine learning
Steps Details
The quality and quantity of data collected will
directly determine whether the prediction mo-
del can be built.Besides,the sparsity and attrib-
Data source
utes of the data from the data source can also
influence the design of the algorithms of Mach-
ine Learning.

Table 1:Four steps of machine learning
Steps Details
Data analysis mainly focuses on data disco-
very and visualization. The main content is
Data analysis
to find the relationship between independe-
nt variables in the-
data and determine the correlation coefficie-
nt.
The main purpose of feature selection and
feature extraction is to transform the origi-
Feature selection
nal data into meaningful input for a given
task.
By using the well processed data set to trai-
n the established model, the training proce-
ss is actually the process of parameter mod-
Data sets training
ulation.The model with high fitting degree
can be obtained by selecting the best algor-
ithm of training.
Today’s more advanced Machine Learning
method,called deep neural networks (DNN),
does not need to use manually annotated fea-
tures It gets the features from the data auto-
matically .This automatic learning method can
map input data to high-dimensional space, so
as to obtain more accurate calculation results,
at the cost of higher complexity.
3 H ARDWARE PLATFORMS OF MA -
CHINE LEARNING
3.1 Current usage of machine learning
hardware
Take deep learning as an example. Baidu’s
Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
(SVAIL) has proposed a DeepBench bench-
mark for deep learning hardware, which fo-
cuses on measuring the hardware performance
of basic calculations rather than the perfor-
mance of learning models.Based on Convo-
lution Neural Network (CNN) and Recur-
rent Neural Network(RNN),DeepBench puts
forward four basic operations: Matrix Multi-
plication (Matrix Multiplication), Convolution
(Convolution), Circulation Layer (Recurrent the
Layers), and All Reduce4 .
In terms of the computing methods we
have mentioned above, GPU has found a new 3.3 Several solutions to the hardware prob-
growth point in Machine Learning due to its lems in machine learning
ability to complete computation independently
and execute parallel commands.In fact, most 3.3.1 Parallel framework of machine learning
Deep Learning (Machine Learning) researchers As a pioneering creation in the field of Ma-
chine Learning, the Convolutional Neural Net-
4. All Reduce: Global Reduction Operations work modeled after the visual cortex can be
2
are using GPUs for deep learning training, and
NVIDIA dominates the current deep learning
market with its massively parallel GPUs and
CUDA, a dedicated GPU programming archi-
tecture.
In addition to GPUs, ASIC and FPGA also
provide some other solutions for Deep Learn-
ing hardware implementation. In addition,
more and more companies have developed
specialized hardwares for Deep Learning, such
as Google’s TPU/Tensor Processing Unit and
Intel’s Xeon Phi Knight’s Landing.
3.2 Problems faced by machine learning at
the hardware level
As we have mentioned earlier, Machine
Learning is becoming more and more embed-
ded.Key metrics for embedded Machine Learn-
ing are accuracy, power consumption, through-
put/latency, and cost.
For Machine Learning hardware systems,
programmability is the first thing to be consid-
ered, because when the conditions, such as the
problem, data environment and so on, change,
the weight coefficient of the corresponding
nodes should also change.And the requirement
of programmability will result in the increase
of data calculation and data transfer.Therefore,
how to increase the computing power of Ma-
chine Learning hardware and minimize data
transmission becomes the key to develop ma-
chine learning hardware.
In addition, throughput depends on the com-
putation. How to process and analyze data to
reduce the amount of computation is also a key
problem of developing hardware systems.
In addition, from the perspective of industry,
how to make machine learning hardwares gain
industrial value( in other words,how to reduce
its cost and power consumption) is also a prob-
lem needed to be solved in the development of
machine learning hardware.

used in both supervised learning and unsuper-
vised learning.Because of its deep structure,ut’s
suitable for tasks with natural hierarchical fea-
tures, such as voice, images, text, etc. In addi-
tion, the representability of convolutional neu-
ral network makes it superior in completing the
iteration work.
Aiming at this deep model, hardware espe-
cially designed for this unique computing net-
work has gradually emerged.For example, the
CNN FPGA accelerator with high throughput,
which has been developed in recent years, is
designed to achieve the highest efficiency in the
calculation of Convolutional Neural Network.
The main principle is shown in Figure 1.
Fig. 1: Top-Level Architecture of the
Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator
We can see from the picture that the pro-
cessing unit (PE) was divided into different
Arraies, which can attribute data from DRAM
to differernt PE Arraies. And these indepen-
dent computing units can be efficient in the
dot product calculation.After calculation, the
results are sent to a specific position waiting
for next layer’s calculation.This process shows
exactly how the design of hardware improves
the computational efficiency.
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3.3.2 Application of new nonvolatile storage
based on memristor in machine learning
Since the process of Machine Learning needs
large amounts of data, the ability to store,
read and write data has a significant impact
on the effectiveness of Machine Learning.The
new non-volatile storage based on memristor
takes advantage of the fact that the resistance of
memristor can ”remember” the information of
the charge of memristor to gain the character-
istic of non-volatile.Due to this special feature
of memristor, the non-volatile storage based on
memristor has the characteristics of fast read-
ing speed and small storage units.These char-
acteristics give this new non-volatile memory
unique advantages in Machine Learning.
In addition, some researches focus on the
technology of integrating multiplication di-
rectly on advanced non-volatile storage, in
which conductance is taken as the weight coef-
ficient of every node in Deep Learning, voltage
is taken as input and current is taken as out-
put.Therefore, such an ohm’s law process com-
pletes a multiplication operation.This method
can greatly improve the efficiency of multipli-
cation calculation in Machine Learning after
proper weighting processing.
4 S UMMARY OF MACHINE LEARNING
HARDWARE PLATFORMS
Machine learning, as an important realiz-
ing method of Artificial Intelligence, needs not
only algorithm improvement and optimization,
but also hardware platform support and in-
novation.For Machine Learning, considerations
on hardwarse mainly focus on the throughput,
accuracy, latency, power consumption and the
cost.In view of these problems, we respectively
put forward two effective solutions, which has
been proved to be useful and promising. In
a word, the innovation and development of
Machine Learning hardwares are inseparable
from softwares.The creation of machine learn-
ing hardware should become increasingly spe-
cialized, adapting to different algorithms or
tasks to achieve higher efficiency.While requir-
ing performance, Machine Learning hardware
manufacturing should also take full account of
power consumption, cost and other industrial
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issues.More researches and efforts are needed

to solve these problems of machine learning
hardware.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the blue sky
and the white cloud and himself.

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