MaxEVA: Maximizing the Efficiency of Matrix Multiplication on Versal AI Engine

The increasing computational and memory requirements of Deep Learning (DL) workloads has led to outstanding innovations in hardware architectures. An archetype of such architectures is the novel Versal AI Engine (AIE) by AMD/Xilinx. The AIE comprises multiple programmable processors optimized for vector-based algorithms. An AIE array consisting of 400 processor cores, operating at 1.25 GHz is able to deliver a peak throughput of 8 TFLOPs for 32-bit floating-point (fp32), and 128 TOPs for 8-bit integer (int8) precision. In this work, we propose MaxEVA: a novel framework to efficiently map Matrix Multiplication (MatMul) workloads on Versal AIE devices. Our framework maximizes the performance and energy efficiency of MatMul applications by efficiently exploiting features of the AIE architecture and resolving performance bottlenecks from multiple angles. When demonstrating on the VC1902 device of the VCK190 board, MaxEVA accomplishes up to 5.44 TFLOPs and 77.01 TOPs throughput for fp32 and int8 precisions, respectively. In terms of energy efficiency, MaxEVA attains up to 85.11 GFLOPs/W for fp32, and 1.73 TOPs/W for int8. Our proposed method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art approach by exhibiting up to 2.19x throughput gain and 29.4% higher energy efficiency. The MaxEVA framework provides notable insights to fill the knowledge gap in effectively designing MatMul-based DL workloads on the new Versal AIE devices.