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Yu Eto

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Eto.

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Design and Evaluation of Energy-Efficient Whisper Dot-Product Kernel Offloading on a CGLA Architecture

In this paper, we implement and evaluate Whisper dot-product kernel offloading on IMAX, a programmable Coarse-Grained Linear Arrays (CGLAs) architecture. Whisper-tiny.en profiling on an ARM Cortex-A72 shows that dot-product operations account for 90.6% of FP16 execution time and 87.1% of Q8_0 execution time. To address this kernel bottleneck, we combine kernel mapping, local-memory sizing, and burst scheduling. The implementation uses inline FP16-to-FP32 conversion, 2-way SIMD FMA on a 64-bit datapath, column-wise multithreading, and mixed execution in which aligned vector segments run on IMAX and residual segments run concurrently on the host CPU. We evaluate the design with an FPGA prototype and a 28nm ASIC projection at 840MHz. For Whisper-tiny.en, 32KB local memory and burst length 16 jointly minimize PDP and EDP. Under a TDP-based cross-platform comparison, the projected IMAX records a PDP of 11.58J for Whisper-tiny.en Q8_0, 2.35x lower than Jetson AGX Orin (27.16J) and 10.48x lower than RTX 4090 (121.38J). The same design extends to Whisper-base.en and Whisper-small.en, where the PDP gap narrows as 32KB local-memory coverage drops from 93.8% for tiny to about 66.5% for base and small. These results position IMAX as a programmable architecture for lower-PDP local ASR in the tiny-model regime.

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Efficient Kernel Mapping and Comprehensive System Evaluation of LLM Acceleration on a CGLA

Large Language Models (LLMs) demand substantial computational resources, resulting in high energy consumption on GPUs. To address this challenge, we focus on Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs) as an effective alternative that provides a trade-off between energy efficiency and programmability. This paper presents the first comprehensive, end-to-end evaluation of a non-AI-specialized Coarse-Grained Linear Array (CGLA) accelerator for the state-of-the-art Qwen LLM family. The architecture has a general-purpose, task-agnostic design, yet its flexible instruction set allows for domain-specific adaptations. This flexibility enables the architecture to achieve high efficiency for sustainable LLM inference. We assess the performance of our architecture on an FPGA prototype using the widely adopted llama.cpp framework. We then project its potential as a 28nm ASIC and compare it against a high-performance GPU (NVIDIA RTX 4090) and an edge AI device (NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin). While GPUs exhibit lower latency, our non-AI-specific accelerator achieves higher energy efficiency, improving the Power-Delay Product (PDP) by up to 44.4x and 13.6x compared with the RTX 4090 and Jetson, respectively. Similarly, it reduces the Energy-Delay Product (EDP) by up to 11.5x compared to the high-performance GPU, demonstrating a favorable performance-energy trade-off. Critically, our system-level analysis identifies host-accelerator data transfer as the primary performance bottleneck, a factor often overlooked in kernel-level studies. These findings provide design guidance for next-generation LLM accelerators. This work validates CGRAs as a suitable platform for LLM inference in power-constrained environments, without being confined to specific algorithms.

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Energy-Efficient Hardware Acceleration of Whisper ASR on a CGLA

The rise of generative AI for tasks like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has created a critical energy consumption challenge. While ASICs offer high efficiency, they lack the programmability to adapt to evolving algorithms. To address this trade-off, we implement and evaluate Whisper's core computational kernel on the IMAX, a general-purpose Coarse-Grained Linear Arrays (CGLAs) accelerator. To our knowledge, this is the first work to execute a Whisper kernel on a CGRA and compare its performance against CPUs and GPUs. Using hardware/software co-design, we evaluate our system via an FPGA prototype and project performance for a 28 nm ASIC. Our results demonstrate superior energy efficiency. The projected ASIC is 1.90x more energy-efficient than the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin and 9.83x more than an NVIDIA RTX 4090 for the Q8_0 model. This work positions CGLA as a promising platform for sustainable ASR on power-constrained edge devices.

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Implementation and Evaluation of Stable Diffusion on a General-Purpose CGLA Accelerator

This paper presents the first implementation and in-depth evaluation of the primary computational kernels from the stable-diffusion.cpp image generation framework on IMAX3, a general-purpose Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) accelerator. We designed IMAX3 as a versatile computational platform, and this work assesses its capabilities by executing a demanding image generation workload. We evaluate its performance on a current Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) prototype to establish a baseline and project its potential for a future Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementation. Our results demonstrate that, despite its general-purpose architecture, IMAX3 achieves promising performance and power efficiency, particularly in its projected ASIC form. This work provides concrete guidelines for future IMAX architectural designs and establishes a foundation for developing next-generation, AI-specialized Coarse-Grained Linear Array (CGLA) accelerators by refining this versatile platform. Ultimately, this achievement contributes to the realization of energy-efficient, on-device, multi-modal AI platforms.

cs.AR