Abstract:Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have become the dominant architecture for large-scale language models, yet on-premises serving remains fundamentally memory-bound as batching turns sparse per-token compute into dense memory activation. Memory-centric architectures (PIM, NMP) improve bandwidth but leave compute underutilized under MoE's low arithmetic intensity at high batch sizes. Speculative decoding (SD) trades idle compute for fewer target invocations, yet verification must load experts even for rejected tokens, severely limiting its benefit in MoE especially at low batch sizes. We propose ELMoE-3D, a hybrid-bonding (HB)-based HW-SW co-designed framework that unifies cache-based acceleration and speculative decoding to offer overall speedup across batch sizes. We identify two intrinsic elasticity axes of MoE-expert and bit-and jointly scale them to construct Elastic Self-Speculative Decoding (Elastic-SD), which serves as both an expert cache and a strongly aligned self-draft model accelerated by high HB bandwidth. Our LSB-augmented bit-sliced architecture exploits inherent redundancy in bit-slice representations to natively support bit-nested execution. On our 3D-stacked hardware, ELMoE-3D achieves an average $6.6\times$ speedup and $4.4\times$ energy efficiency gain over naive MoE serving on xPU across batch sizes 1-16, and delivers $2.2\times$ speedup and $1.4\times$ energy efficiency gain over the best-performing prior accelerator baseline.
Abstract:Low-bit quantization is a promising technique for efficient transformer inference by reducing computational and memory overhead. However, aggressive bitwidth reduction remains challenging due to activation outliers, leading to accuracy degradation. Existing methods, such as outlier-handling and group quantization, achieve high accuracy but incur substantial energy consumption. To address this, we propose SeVeDo, an energy-efficient SVD-based heterogeneous accelerator that structurally separates outlier-sensitive components into a high-precision low-rank path, while the remaining computations are executed in a low-bit residual datapath with group quantization. To further enhance efficiency, Hierarchical Group Quantization (HGQ) combines coarse-grained floating-point scaling with fine-grained shifting, effectively reducing dequantization cost. Also, SVD-guided mixed precision (SVD-MP) statically allocates higher bitwidths to precision-sensitive components identified through low-rank decomposition, thereby minimizing floating-point operation cost. Experimental results show that SeVeDo achieves a peak energy efficiency of 13.8TOPS/W, surpassing conventional designs, with 12.7TOPS/W on ViT-Base and 13.4TOPS/W on Llama2-7B benchmarks.