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arXiv · 2411.17847

SoftmAP: Software-Hardware Co-design for Integer-Only Softmax on Associative Processors

Mariam Rakka·Jinhao Li·Guohao Dai·Ahmed Eltawil·Mohammed E. Fouda·Fadi Kurdahi
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Abstract

Recent research efforts focus on reducing the computational and memory overheads of Large Language Models (LLMs) to make them feasible on resource-constrained devices. Despite advancements in compression techniques, non-linear operators like Softmax and Layernorm remain bottlenecks due to their sensitivity to quantization. We propose SoftmAP, a software-hardware co-design methodology that implements an integer-only low-precision Softmax using In-Memory Compute (IMC) hardware. Our method achieves up to three orders of magnitude improvement in the energy-delay product compared to A100 and RTX3090 GPUs, making LLMs more deployable without compromising performance.

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Mariam Rakka, Jinhao Li, Guohao Dai, Ahmed Eltawil, Mohammed E. Fouda, Fadi Kurdahi. 2024-11-26. SoftmAP: Software-Hardware Co-design for Integer-Only Softmax on Associative Processors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.17847

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