M3D-FLOW: A Monolithic 3-D-Stackable Processing-Near-DRAM Architecture for Generative Normalizing Flow Applications

Abstract

Normalizing Flows (NFs) have shown strong results in generative modeling, recently reaching state-of-the-art image generation performance. However, their repetitive, sequential operations limit the computational and memory efficiency achievable with GPUs and TPUs. We propose M3D-FLOW, a novel monolithic 3D-stackable (M3D) DRAM-based processing-near-memory (PNM) architecture that eliminates memory bottlenecks using a Cu-Cu hybrid-bonded logic die integrated with an M3D DRAM die. The M3D DRAM provides dense bank integration and a tiered organization with variable access latencies that M3D-FLOW exploits for the efficient processing of different NF workloads. To maximize compute density while minimizing area, energy, and thermal overhead, M3D-FLOW employs hybrid binary--stochastic floating-point multipliers, performing mantissa multiplication in the stochastic domain and exponent operations in the binary domain. A pipelined execution strategy maps sequential NF stages across dynamically partitioned PE groups, and together with the stochastic hardware, enables M3D-FLOW to achieve at least $6.6\times$ higher performance and $3\times$ better energy efficiency than prior PNM accelerators, with only a 2.2% bits-per-dimension (BPD) increase over bfloat16 and 4.1% over FP32. An analysis of stochastic hardware variants further shows that shorter stochastic bitstreams reduce execution time by up to $3.3\times$ at the cost of higher approximation error, providing a concrete design guide for latency--accuracy trade-offs.