OpenNMT / OpenNMT/CTranslate2

Support float16 on ARM CPUs with native float16 support

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cpu enhancement
Dominant language
C++
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

From https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper/issues/65


Some CPUs such as ARM Neoverse-N1 (Oracle Cloud free tier) support FP16 computation.
It would be nice to have this feature because there could be up to a 2x speedup in computation speed compared to float32.

I'm just creating the enhancement request and understand that there might not be a focus on this because it only applies to a small subset of CPUs.

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Research direction

The issue names no source files, tests, or entry points. Start by locating the CPU computation and float32 pathways, then determine how native ARM float16 support is detected and benchmarked; done means correct float16 computation on supported ARM CPUs with the expected performance improvement.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
performance
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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