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Causal Attention on CPU: A Cache-Aware and Load-Balanced Scheduling Kernel for Prefill

arXiv机器学习 2026-10-29 04:08 5 阅读 查看原文

Agentic AI drives significant productivity gains across diverse domains, but concurrent long-context prefills from multiple agents can saturate GPU compute resources.

Although CPUs offer a viable alternative, existing CPU attention kernels fall short in adapting to multi-tier cache hierarchies and lack effective thread scheduling.

Introduction to CACPU

To address this, we introduce CACPU, a high-performance attention kernel featuring tiered cache blocking and an in-kernel task dispatching mechanism designed for causal full-sequence prefilling.

  • CACPU achieves up to a 2.01x speedup over PyTorch SDPA, FlexAttention, and SGLang attention kernels.
  • Integrated into SGLang, it reduces Time to First Token (TTFT) of Llama-3.1-8B by up to a 1.74x while preserving model accuracy.