  Deep Learning (DL) has transformed the automation of a wide range of
industries and finds increasing ubiquity in society. The high complexity of DL
models and its widespread adoption has led to global energy consumption
doubling every 3-4 months. Currently, the relationship between the DL model
configuration and energy consumption is not well established. At a general
computational energy model level, there is both strong dependency to both the
hardware architecture (e.g. generic processors with different configuration of
inner components- CPU and GPU, programmable integrated circuits - FPGA), as
well as different interacting energy consumption aspects (e.g., data movement,
calculation, control). At the DL model level, we need to translate non-linear
activation functions and its interaction with data into calculation tasks.
Current methods mainly linearize nonlinear DL models to approximate its
theoretical FLOPs and MACs as a proxy for energy consumption. Yet, this is
inaccurate (est. 93\% accuracy) due to the highly nonlinear nature of many
convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for example.
  In this paper, we develop a bottom-level Transistor Operations (TOs) method
to expose the role of non-linear activation functions and neural network
structure in energy consumption. We translate a range of feedforward and CNN
models into ALU calculation tasks and then TO steps. This is then statistically
linked to real energy consumption values via a regression model for different
hardware configurations and data sets. We show that our proposed TOs method can
achieve a 93.61% - 99.51% precision in predicting its energy consumption.
