One embodiment provides for a computer-readable medium storing instructions that cause one or more processors to perform operations comprising determining a per-layer scale factor to apply to tensor data associated with layers of a neural network model and converting the tensor data to converted tensor data. The tensor data may be converted from a floating point datatype to a second datatype that is an 8-bit datatype. The instructions further cause the one or more processors to generate an output tensor based on the converted tensor data and the per-layer scale factor.