1-Bit AI Infrastructure

So basically the idea is to pack 3 ternary weights (-1,0,1) into 5 bits instead of 6, but they compare the results with fp16 model which would use 48 bits for those 3 weights…

And speed up comes from the memory io, compensated a bit by the need to unpack these weights before using them…

Did I get this right?

Yeah, that seems to be the case. Though, I suspect Microsoft is interested in implementing something like a custom RISC-V CPU that has an ALU that's tuned for doing this ternary math and added custom vector/matrix instructions. Something like that could save them a lot of power in their data centers.

If it were to catch on then perhaps we'd see Intel, AMD, ARM adding math ops optimized for doing ternary math?