  In recent years, advances in deep learning have resulted in unprecedented
leaps in diverse tasks spanning from speech and object recognition to context
awareness and health monitoring. As a result, an increasing number of
AI-enabled applications are being developed targeting ubiquitous and mobile
devices. While deep neural networks (DNNs) are getting bigger and more complex,
they also impose a heavy computational and energy burden on the host devices,
which has led to the integration of various specialized processors in commodity
devices. Given the broad range of competing DNN architectures and the
heterogeneity of the target hardware, there is an emerging need to understand
the compatibility between DNN-platform pairs and the expected performance
benefits on each platform. This work attempts to demystify this landscape by
systematically evaluating a collection of state-of-the-art DNNs on a wide
variety of commodity devices. In this respect, we identify potential
bottlenecks in each architecture and provide important guidelines that can
assist the community in the co-design of more efficient DNNs and accelerators.
