ThAME: 3D Memory-Enabled Heterogeneous Accelerator for LLM Mixture of Experts

arXiv:2607.17074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a dominant paradigm for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MoE inference on conventional hardware is constrained by three fundamental bottlenecks. These encompass the massive memory bandwidth required to fetch non-contiguous expert weights, the non-deterministic scatter-gather traffic generated by input-dependent token routing, and the tail-latency dependency imposed by synchronous expert output aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose ThAME, a three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneous multi-chiplet architecture for MoE inference. ThAME employs Ferroelectric Field-Effect Transistor (FeFET)-based non-volatile and DRAM-based volatile memory chiplets with a co-designed compute mapping strategy that aligns the distinct computational profiles of attention mechanisms and expert routing. Furthermore, we design a specialized Network-on-Chip communication backbone optimized to mitigate the bottlenecks associated with non-deterministic token routing traffic across the combinatorial space of input-dependent MoE traffic patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that ThAME outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts by up to 15.7x in terms of speedup and improves energy efficiency by up to 9.8x.

Abstract:Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a dominant paradigm for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MoE inference on conventional hardware is constrained by three fundamental bottlenecks. These encompass the massive memory bandwidth required to fetch non-contiguous expert weights, the non-deterministic scatter-gather traffic generated by input-dependent token routing, and the tail-latency dependency imposed by synchronous expert output aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose ThAME, a three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneous multi-chiplet architecture for MoE inference. ThAME employs Ferroelectric Field-Effect Transistor (FeFET)-based non-volatile and DRAM-based volatile memory chiplets with a co-designed compute mapping strategy that aligns the distinct computational profiles of attention mechanisms and expert routing. Furthermore, we design a specialized Network-on-Chip communication backbone optimized to mitigate the bottlenecks associated with non-deterministic token routing traffic across the combinatorial space of input-dependent MoE traffic patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that ThAME outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts by up to 15.7x in terms of speedup and improves energy efficiency by up to 9.8x.

Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)

arXiv:2607.17074 [cs.AR]

(or arXiv:2607.17074v1 [cs.AR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.17074 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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ThAME: 3D Memory-Enabled Heterogeneous Accelerator for LLM Mixture of Experts

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