O-POPE: High-Frequency Pipelined Outer Product based GEMM acceleration with minimal buffering overhead

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Cammarata, Danilo, Garofalo, Angelo, Benini, Luca
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Cammarata, Danilo
Garofalo, Angelo
Benini, Luca
author_facet Cammarata, Danilo
Garofalo, Angelo
Benini, Luca
contents General matrix multiply (GEMM) dominates both execution time and energy consumption of modern machine learning (ML) workloads, placing increasing pressure on hardware efficiency. While quantization mitigates computational and data movement costs, accuracy-sensitive tasks such as training still require higher-precision floating-point formats. Existing floating-point GEMM accelerators face trade-offs between operating frequency, arithmetic utilization, and buffering overhead. This work presents O-POPE, a scalable outer-product engine that achieves concurrently high utilization, low overhead, and a fast operating frequency by repurposing floating-point unit (FPU) pipeline registers as buffers. This solution leverages the data-reuse advantages of output-stationary outer-product execution and enables 1 GHz (0.72 V) operation in 12 nm FINFET technology with less than 2% buffer area for a 2048-MACs configuration. Our evaluation shows that O-POPE achieves up to 99.97% FPU utilization and improves performance (1.33x), performance density by 9%, and energy efficiency by 8%, compared to state-of-the-art floating-point GEMM accelerators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_02333
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle O-POPE: High-Frequency Pipelined Outer Product based GEMM acceleration with minimal buffering overhead
Cammarata, Danilo
Garofalo, Angelo
Benini, Luca
Hardware Architecture
General matrix multiply (GEMM) dominates both execution time and energy consumption of modern machine learning (ML) workloads, placing increasing pressure on hardware efficiency. While quantization mitigates computational and data movement costs, accuracy-sensitive tasks such as training still require higher-precision floating-point formats. Existing floating-point GEMM accelerators face trade-offs between operating frequency, arithmetic utilization, and buffering overhead. This work presents O-POPE, a scalable outer-product engine that achieves concurrently high utilization, low overhead, and a fast operating frequency by repurposing floating-point unit (FPU) pipeline registers as buffers. This solution leverages the data-reuse advantages of output-stationary outer-product execution and enables 1 GHz (0.72 V) operation in 12 nm FINFET technology with less than 2% buffer area for a 2048-MACs configuration. Our evaluation shows that O-POPE achieves up to 99.97% FPU utilization and improves performance (1.33x), performance density by 9%, and energy efficiency by 8%, compared to state-of-the-art floating-point GEMM accelerators.
title O-POPE: High-Frequency Pipelined Outer Product based GEMM acceleration with minimal buffering overhead
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02333