paper(intro): edit-pass through §1 Introduction done

- §1 Introduction rewritten with AHBM-first opening, in-paper KernBench
  platform overview, GQA motivation and three architectural requirements,
  three matching HW-SW co-design mechanisms (GQA-aware placement,
  PE_IPCQ, composite-command GEMM under PE_SCHEDULER), broader-
  applicability outlook (PE_IPCQ as collective substrate, composite
  command for fused operator pipelines), and outline. Consistent with
  the Executive Summary structure.
- Executive Summary: extended broader-applicability closing with a
  forward-looking line previewing FFN/MoE integration.
- §5 section heading renamed from
  "All-Reduce Acceleration via PE_IPCQ" to
  "PE_IPCQ and Collective Communication".
- Title page date line refined to "2026 H1 Report".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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\date{ \date{
\small \small
AGI Computing Lab, System Technology Group\\ AGI Computing Lab, System Technology Group\\
H1 2026 2026 H1 Report
} }
\begin{document} \begin{document}
@@ -30,4 +30,7 @@ composite-command execution enables efficient fusion of memory
movement, GEMM kernels, normalization, and other element-wise movement, GEMM kernels, normalization, and other element-wise
operations. Together with the hierarchical data-placement framework, operations. Together with the hierarchical data-placement framework,
these capabilities form a reusable foundation for future AI kernels these capabilities form a reusable foundation for future AI kernels
and communication libraries on AHBM. and communication libraries on AHBM. Looking ahead, these same mechanisms provide
the basis for optimizing FFN-intensive workloads such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)
layers and for developing integrated optimization strategies spanning both attention
and MoE components within next-generation AI models.
@@ -1,49 +1,83 @@
\section{Introduction} \section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro} \label{sec:intro}
The performance of a large language model on an accelerator is decided less AHBM integrates compute units directly into the HBM stack. Each
by peak FLOPS than by how well the kernel exploits the memory system and processing element (PE) is paired with a dedicated slice of HBM and uses
the interconnect. This is especially true of attention, which in the local TCM and SRAM to stage data between memory and the MAC array. On
decode phase reads a large KV cache to do a small amount of arithmetic. this memory-centric architecture, kernel performance depends not only on
Optimizing such kernels is fundamentally a \emph{codesign} problem: the compute throughput but also on how effectively data is placed, moved,
algorithm (how to tile, fuse, and reduce) and the hardware (what issue and shared across the memory hierarchy and between PEs. Optimizing AI
mechanism, what collective engine, what memory hierarchy) have to be kernels on AHBM therefore requires hardware--software co-design, in
designed against each other. Optimizing only the software leaves the which kernel algorithms and architectural mechanisms are developed
hardware idle; adding hardware that the software cannot reach is wasted together.
area.
\paragraph{The 1H focus: attention.} This half's work targets attention. To enable detailed performance analysis and rapid design exploration, we
Multi-head attention (MHA) was studied previously and is taken here as the developed \textbf{KernBench}, a source-level discrete-event simulation
established baseline. The new work is FlashAttention-style tiling and platform for AHBM. KernBench implements the AHBM execution model,
Grouped-Query Attention (GQA)---the form used by modern long-context including memory-system latencies, the PE execution model, inter-PE
decoders, in which several query heads share a single KV head to shrink the communication, and host-side orchestration, while executing both kernel
KV cache. Realizing a fast \emph{fused} GQA kernel, however, is not a and host software directly from source code. This provides fine-grained
single optimization. It decomposes into two enabling optimizations that we visibility into execution behavior. It enables systematic evaluation of hardware--software co-design choices
studied separately and then brought together inside the fused kernel: independently of higher-level software stacks such as compilers and
runtimes. All
results presented in this report are obtained using KernBench, which
serves as the common evaluation platform for all mechanisms and kernels
discussed in this study.
\begin{enumerate} This report focuses on Grouped-Query Attention (GQA), one of the most
\item \textbf{GEMM optimization} via a composite command performance- and bandwidth-critical components of LLM inference. Modern
(\S\ref{sec:gemm}): a way to issue a tiled matrix multiply as one decoder-only models such as Llama~3 and Mistral have largely transitioned
self-routing pipeline so the MAC array stays fed without per-tile command from GPT-3-style multi-head attention (MHA) to GQA, in which multiple
overhead. Attention's $Q\!\cdot\!K^{\top}$ and $P\!\cdot\!V$ products are query heads share a single KV head to reduce KV cache capacity and
exactly such GEMMs. memory-bandwidth requirements. While GQA improves system efficiency at
\item \textbf{Communication optimization} via PE\_IPCQ the model level, mapping it efficiently onto AHBM introduces three
(\S\ref{sec:allreduce}): a per-PE on-device collective engine that architectural requirements: optimized placement of KV caches and weights
performs all-reduce overlapped with compute. Attention's multi-user and to minimize inter-PE communication, low-overhead support for unavoidable
sequence-parallel KV reductions are exactly such collectives. cross-PE traffic, and efficient pipelining of memory accesses and
\end{enumerate} computation within each PE.
The report therefore reads as \emph{two enablers building to one capstone}: To address these requirements, this report introduces three
GEMM (\S\ref{sec:gemm}) and all-reduce (\S\ref{sec:allreduce}) are hardware--software co-design mechanisms. First, GQA-aware data placement
developed and measured on their own, and then fused GQA distributes KV caches and weights across the TCM/SRAM/HBM hierarchy to
(\S\ref{sec:gqa}) shows them operating together. Before the results, reduce communication overhead and improve data locality. Second,
\S\ref{sec:platform} describes the KernBench platform---why a PE\_IPCQ provides an efficient on-device collective communication
software-stack-independent, source-level simulator is the right tool for primitive for reductions and other communication-intensive operations.
this question, how it executes a kernel, how it computes latency and how Third, a composite-command GEMM pipeline tightly pipelines memory
accurate that is, and the exact hardware configuration used throughout. movement and computation within each PE under PE\_SCHEDULER control,
We close with a cross-cutting discussion of which hardware changes are reducing command overhead while keeping the MAC array efficiently
worth their cost (\S\ref{sec:discussion}), a conclusion utilized.
(\S\ref{sec:conclusion}), and the 2H agenda
(\S\ref{sec:future}): extending from attention to the feed-forward and The compute enabler (the composite-command GEMM pipeline,
mixture-of-experts layers, and to the compute/data distribution questions \S\ref{sec:gemm}) and the communication enabler (PE\_IPCQ,
that full LLM decoding and agentic workloads raise. \S\ref{sec:allreduce}) are first developed and evaluated independently.
The fused GQA kernel (\S\ref{sec:gqa}) then combines them with
GQA-aware data placement to demonstrate an end-to-end attention
implementation on AHBM. The correspondence is direct: attention's
$QK^{\top}$ and $PV$ products are precisely the GEMMs that benefit from
the composite-command pipeline, while its KV reductions are precisely
the collective operations that benefit from PE\_IPCQ. Together, these
mechanisms enable the fused GQA kernel to efficiently exploit AHBM's HBM
bandwidth.
Although GQA serves as the motivating workload for this study, the
resulting mechanisms are intended as reusable building blocks for a much
broader class of AI kernels. PE\_IPCQ can support collective
communication across distributed and communication-intensive workloads,
while composite-command execution can be applied to GEMM-based kernels,
feed-forward networks (FFNs), normalization, and other fused operator
pipelines. Together with the hierarchical data-placement framework,
these mechanisms form a foundation for future AI kernels and
communication libraries on AHBM. In the second half of 2026, this
foundation will be extended to FFN- and MoE-dominated workloads and to
end-to-end optimization of complete LLM execution.
The remainder of this report is organized as follows.
Section~\ref{sec:platform} describes the KernBench platform and the AHBM
configuration used throughout this study. Sections~\ref{sec:gemm},
\ref{sec:allreduce}, and \ref{sec:gqa} present the composite-command
GEMM pipeline, PE\_IPCQ collective communication, and the fused GQA
kernel, respectively. Section~\ref{sec:discussion} discusses the broader
architectural implications of these results. Finally,
Sections~\ref{sec:conclusion} and \ref{sec:future} summarize the key
findings and outline future work on FFN, MoE, and full-model
optimization.
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
\section{All-Reduce Acceleration via PE\_IPCQ} \section{PE\_IPCQ and Collective Communication}
\label{sec:allreduce} \label{sec:allreduce}
\subsection{Why it is needed} \subsection{Why it is needed}