Dynamic Power Consumption of the Full Posit Processing Unit: Analysis and Experiments

Since its introduction in 2017, the Posit™ format for representing real numbers has attracted a lot of interest, as an alternative to IEEE 754 floating point representation. Several hardware implementations of arithmetic operations between posit numbers have also been proposed in recent years. In this work, we analyze the dynamic power consumption of the Full Posit Processing Unit (FPPU) recently developed at the University of Pisa. Experimental results show that we can model the dynamic power consumption of the FPPU with an acceptable approximation error from 2.84% (32-bit FPPU) to 7.32% (8-bit FPPU). Furthermore, from the synthesis of the power monitoring unit alongside the FPPU we demonstrate that the additional power module has an area cost that goes from ∼ 5% (32-bit FPPU) to ∼ 30% (8-bit FPPU) of the total unit area occupation