The Laplace Microarchitecture for Tracking Data Uncertainty and Its Implementation in a RISC-V Processor

We present Laplace, a microarchitecture for tracking machine representations of probability distributions paired with architectural state. We present two new methods for in-processor distribution representations which are approximations of probability distributions just as floating-point number representations are approximations of real-valued numbers. Laplace executes unmodified RISC-V binaries and can track uncertainty through them. We present two sets of ISA extensions to provide a mechanism to initialize distributional information in the microarchitecture and to allow applications to query statistics of the distributional information without exposing the uncertainty representations above the ISA.