English

MxGLUT: A Reconfigurable LUT-Centric Broadcast Dataflow Accelerator for Mixed-Precision GEMM

Hardware Architecture 2026-07-02 v1

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) inference suffers from growing inefficiency across the prefill and decode phases, especially under weight-only quantization, where activations remain in FP8 while weights are compressed to low-bit integers. Existing LUT-based accelerators mainly target FP8-INT4 computation and still rely on separate floating-point (FP) datapaths for attention GEMM operations, leading to redundant hardware and non-unified mixed-precision execution. Moreover, their static dataflows are poorly matched to the distinct prefill and decode phases. To address these challenges, we propose MxGLUT, a reconfigurable LUT-centric broadcast (RLB) dataflow accelerator built on mixed-precision LUT-based processing elements (MxLPEs). Guided by a unified LUT-based execution framework, MxGLUT organizes both FP8-INT4 and FP8-FP8 GEMMs under a single LUT-based compute mechanism without dedicated FP multipliers or additional FP datapaths, and further adopts the RLB dataflow that localizes heavy partial-sum accumulation during the prefill phase and exploits weight reuse in the decode phase. Synthesized in UMC 28nm28\,\mathrm{nm} CMOS at 200 MHz200~\mathrm{MHz}, MxGLUT reduces multiplier area by up to 56.92%56.92\% and power by up to 77.07%77.07\% and 78.35%78.35\% in FP8-INT4 and FP8-FP8 modes, respectively. At the accelerator level, MxGLUT achieves an area efficiency of 0.492 TFLOPS/mm20.492~\mathrm{TFLOPS/mm^2} and an energy efficiency of 11.58 TFLOPS/W11.58~\mathrm{TFLOPS/W}, while adding native FP8-FP8 support incurs only 2.57%2.57\% and 3.34%3.34\% reductions in area and energy efficiency, respectively, relative to the FP8-INT4-only FIGLUT baseline. Across the Llama family, MxGLUT achieves up to 2.16×2.16\times and 1.49×1.49\times latency speedup, and reduces normalized energy to 0.44×0.44\times and 0.71×0.71\times in prefill and decode, respectively, with at most 1.70%1.70\% perplexity increase.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.01607,
  title  = {MxGLUT: A Reconfigurable LUT-Centric Broadcast Dataflow Accelerator for Mixed-Precision GEMM},
  author = {Weiyu Zhou and Chen Ding and Mingyuan Liu and Liangyu Gan and Yukun Feng and Hao Jia and Haoming Chu and Lirong Zheng and Ning Ma and Yuxiang Huan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.01607},
  year   = {2026}
}