Training Quantization News Today

This paper attempts to address and reconcile two different issues: the existence of multiple numerical data formats (such as int8, bfloat16, fp8, etc., often non optimal for the application and not directly compatible with one another) and the necessity to reduce their bandwidth requirements, especially in the case of power hungry and slow DRAM.

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Large transformer models are mainstream nowadays, creating SoTA results for a variety of tasks. They are powerful but very expensive to train and use. The extremely high inference cost, in both time and memory, is a big bottleneck for adopting a powerful transformer for solving real-world tasks at scale. Why is it hard to run inference for large transformer models? Besides the increasing size of SoTA models, there are two main factors contributing to the inference challenge (Pope et al.