Hybrid Systolic Array Accelerator with Optimized Dataflow for Edge Large Language Model Inference
This work addresses the problem of high area and energy efficiency for edge LLM inference, offering a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the challenge of efficient edge inference for large language models by proposing a hybrid systolic array accelerator with optimized dataflow, achieving 247/117 tokens/s/mm² for a 1.3B model and over 2.45x/13.5x improvements over existing approaches.
Edge inference for large language models (LLM) offers secure, low-latency, and cost-effective inference solutions. We emphasize that an edge accelerator should achieve high area efficiency and minimize external memory access (EMA) during the memory-bound decode stage, while maintaining high energy efficiency during the compute intensive prefill stage. This paper proposes an edge LLM inference accelerator featuring a hybrid systolic array (HSA) architecture that optimizes inference efficiency in both stages. To further reduce EMA, we adopt MXINT4 weight quantization and propose an optimized dataflow tailored for HSA, ensuring negligible dequantization overhead and achieving 100% hardware utilization with minimal accuracy loss under edge DRAM bandwidth constraints. For non-linear operations, we incorporate optimized root mean square normalization (RMSNorm) and rotary position embedding (RoPE) units, reducing their latency, area, and memory access overhead while enabling end-to-end inference on our accelerator. Our solution achieves 247/117 (token/s/mm2) while running a 1.3B LLM on long-input/long-output scenarios, providing >2.45x/13.5x improvement over existing approaches, while maintaining superior energy efficiency in token generation.