Optimizing CNN Model Inference on CPUs

The popularity of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and the ubiquity of CPUs imply that better performance of CNN model inference on CPUs can deliver significant gain to a large number of users. To improve the performance of CNN inference on CPUs, current approaches like MXNet and Intel OpenVINO usually treat the model as a graph and use the high-performance libraries such as Intel MKL-DNN to implement the operations of the graph. While achieving reasonable performance on individual operations from the off-the-shelf libraries, this solution makes it inflexible to conduct optimizations at the graph level, as the local operation-level optimizations are predefined. Therefore, it is restrictive and misses the opportunity to optimize the end-to-end inference pipeline as a whole. This paper presents NeoCPU, a comprehensive approach of CNN model inference on CPUs that employs a full-stack and systematic scheme of optimizations. NeoCPU optimizes the operations as templates without relying on third-parties libraries, which enables further improvement of the performance via operation- and graph-level joint optimization. Experiments show that NeoCPU achieves up to 3.45× lower latency for CNN model inference than the current state-of-the-art implementations on various kinds of popular CPUs.