Compiling for specialized AI accelerators like Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) or various Neural Processing Units (NPUs) presents distinct challenges and requires different strategies compared to generating code for general-purpose CPUs or even GPUs. While GPUs offer massive parallelism through SIMT (Single Instruction, Multiple Threads), AI accelerators often employ architectures like Systolic Arrays or heavily rely on VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) principles, coupled with specialized memory hierarchies and data types, demanding highly tailored compiler backends.

Architectural Divergence and Compiler Implications

AI accelerators achieve performance and efficiency gains by specializing hardware for common ML operations, particularly matrix multiplications (GEMM) and convolutions. Key architectural features that influence compiler design include:

Systolic Arrays: Prevalent in TPUs, these consist of a grid of Processing Elements (PEs) where data flows rhythmically across the array. Compilers must map matrix multiplications onto this physical grid, managing data movement timing precisely to keep the PEs busy. This involves sophisticated tiling, data layout transformations specific to the array dimensions, and scheduling input/output operations to match the array's pipeline latency. The compiler needs to abstract the systolic array execution model, often through dedicated IR dialects or operations (e.g., TPUExecute in XLA's HLO).
VLIW and Instruction Bundling: Many NPUs utilize VLIW architectures where the compiler is responsible for identifying and explicitly scheduling independent operations into instruction bundles for parallel execution in a single cycle. This shifts complexity from hardware (like out-of-order execution units in CPUs) to the compiler. Effective VLIW scheduling requires detailed knowledge of functional unit latencies, register file ports, and potential hazards, making instruction scheduling a critical and complex optimization pass.
Specialized Data Types and Functional Units: Accelerators often feature hardware optimized for low-precision formats (INT8, FP8, block FP formats) and specialized functional units beyond GEMM engines, such as activation function units or pooling units. The compiler must effectively utilize these units through targeted instruction selection and manage the necessary quantization and dequantization steps, often propagating quantization parameters (scales, zero-points) through the compilation process.
Memory Hierarchies: Accelerator memory systems frequently involve software-managed scratchpads (local memories) alongside larger, higher-latency main memory (like HBM). Compilers must perform explicit memory management, orchestrating Direct Memory Access (DMA) transfers between main memory and scratchpads. This requires sophisticated data reuse analysis, tiling strategies optimized for scratchpad size, and careful scheduling of computation and data movement to hide latency (double buffering, etc.). Unlike caches, scratchpad management is entirely under compiler/runtime control.

Compilation Flow and Techniques

The compilation flow for AI accelerators typically involves multiple levels of IR lowering and specialization:

A typical compilation flow for targeting specialized AI accelerators, involving progressive lowering through different IR levels.

Key compilation stages and techniques include:

Dialect Conversion/Lowering: High-level framework operations are progressively lowered through intermediate dialects (like in MLIR) or IRs (like XLA HLO) into representations closer to the hardware. This involves legalizing operations, data types, and layouts for the target architecture.
Layout Assignment: Choosing optimal data layouts (e.g., specialized tiled formats for systolic array inputs) is critical and performed early.
Memory Planning: Static or semi-static planning allocates tensors to scratchpads or main memory, optimizing for data reuse within scratchpads. DMA transfer operations are explicitly inserted.
Systolic Array Mapping: For TPU-like architectures, matrix multiplies and convolutions are tiled and scheduled onto the systolic array PEs. This often involves complex loop transformations and data placement strategies within the compiler.
VLIW Scheduling: For VLIW-based NPUs, instruction-level parallelism is explicitly managed. Techniques like software pipelining and meticulous dependency analysis are used to pack instruction bundles efficiently.
Instruction Selection: Matching operations to the accelerator's specific instruction set, including utilizing specialized low-precision units or activation function hardware.
Code Generation: Emitting the final binary instructions or microcode for the target processor.

Vendor Toolchains and Abstractions

Most AI accelerators come with proprietary vendor compiler toolchains (e.g., Google's XLA compiler for TPUs, various NPU SDKs). These toolchains often expose specific IRs or programming models. While frameworks like MLIR aim to provide a common infrastructure, deep target-specific knowledge is still required within the backend. Compilers might generate calls to vendor-supplied kernel libraries for certain operations, similar to cuDNN or MIOpen, but often, the compiler is responsible for generating code for the core compute operations itself due to the unique architectures involved. Integration often happens at an IR level, where the main compiler lowers to a vendor-specific dialect or IR before invoking the final backend stages.

Successfully targeting AI accelerators requires compiler technology that deeply understands and models the specific hardware characteristics, moving far beyond traditional CPU/GPU compilation techniques to manage explicit parallelism, specialized functional units, and software-controlled memories.