MeshKV: A Network-on-Chip KV Cache Fabric for Scalable Transformer Decoding Accelerators

Abstract:Autoregressive transformer decoding is constrained by irregular key-value (KV) cache movement on tiled accelerators. Prior compression and DRAM-placement systems still concentrate traffic on centralized memory paths that bottleneck long-context serving. We present MeshKV, a KV cache fabric that moves blocks as packetized flows over a lightweight NoC. It co-designs (i) TaKV affine striping to spread homes and cut hotspot load, (ii) Mare multicast with verified duplicate suppression, and (iii) Pad, which overlaps prefetch, tile multiply, and streaming softmax behind credit-aligned FIFOs. Together they convert bisection back-pressure into useful KV transfer. On our 8x8 FPGA implementation with LLaMA-2-7B and Mistral-7B at 8K-32K, MeshKV reduces interconnect traffic by up to 58%, improves KV bandwidth utilization by 2.1x, and delivers up to 1.9x multi-stream throughput.

Accepted as Conference Paper at the 44th IEEE International Conference on Computer Design. (ICCD 2026)

Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.19207 [cs.AR]

(or arXiv:2609.19207v1 [cs.AR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.19207 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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