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arXiv · 2611.08526

RoadBlock: Rethinking GPU Tensor Core Microarchitecture for Emerging Microscaling Format Support

Nikhil Rout·Blaise Tine
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Abstract

While multiple recent custom Microscaling (MX) format proposals preserve higher model quality over OCP MX, their hardware evaluations remain confined to standalone MAC-unit prototypes, ignoring the system-level integration overheads inside real GPU Tensor Cores. To this end, we present RoadBlock, an open-source framework for accurate end-to-end modeling of custom MX formats in a programmable Tensor Core, built on the RISC-V Vortex GPGPU. RoadBlock exposes data size, scale-factor size, and block size as configurable parameters and automatically derives per-thread metadata tiling for arbitrary formats, enabling format-specific Perplexity-PPA tradeoff evaluation before silicon commitment.

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Nikhil Rout, Blaise Tine. 2026-11-04. RoadBlock: Rethinking GPU Tensor Core Microarchitecture for Emerging Microscaling Format Support. https://doi.org/10.1145/3838684.3847309

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