Approximate Computing

Approximate computing is an emerging paradigm for energy-efficient and high-performance design. It includes a range of computation techniques that return a possibly inaccurate result rather than a guaranteed accurate result, used for applications where an approximate result is sufficient for its purpose, such as a search engine query with no single exact answer or a video application where occasional dropped frames go unnoticed due to human perceptual limitations. Approximate computing is based on the observation that in many scenarios, although exact computation requires large amounts of resources, allowing bounded approximation can provide disproportionate gains in performance and energy while still achieving acceptable result accuracy.