Towards Approximate Computing for Achieving Energy vs. Accuracy Trade-offs

Despite the recent advances in semiconductor technology and energy-aware system design, the overall energy consumption of computing and communication systems is rapidly growing. On the one hand, the pervasiveness of these technologies everywhere in the form of mobile devices, cyber-physical embedded systems, sensor networks, wearables, social media and context-awareness, intelligent machines, broadband cellular networks, Cloud computing, and Internet of Things (IoT) has drastically increased the demand for computing and communications. On the other hand, the user expectations on features and battery life of online devices are increasing all the time, and it creates another incentive for finding good trade-offs between performance and energy consumption. One of the opportunities to address this growing demand is to utilize an Approximate Computing approach through software and hardware design. The APROPOS project aims at finding the balance between accuracy and energy consumption, and this short paper provides an initial overview of the corresponding roadmap, as the project is still in the initial stage.