An Investigation of FP8 Across Accelerators for LLM Inference

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01070v2
• Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2025 04:04:51 GMT
• Title: An Investigation of FP8 Across Accelerators for LLM Inference
• Authors: Jiwoo Kim, Joonhyung Lee, Gunho Park, Byeongwook Kim, Se Jung Kwon, Dongsoo Lee, Youngjoo Lee,
• Abstract summary: We provide the first comprehensive analysis of FP8 computation on two AI accelerators: the NVIDIA H100 and Intel Gaudi 2. Our findings highlight that the Gaudi 2, by leveraging FP8, achieves higher throughput-to-power efficiency during inference.
• Score: 7.910301381209274
• License:
• Abstract: The introduction of 8-bit floating-point (FP8) computation units in modern AI accelerators has generated significant interest in FP8-based large language model (LLM) inference. Unlike 16-bit floating-point formats, FP8 in deep learning requires a shared scaling factor. Additionally, while E4M3 and E5M2 are well-defined at the individual value level, their scaling and accumulation methods remain unspecified and vary across hardware and software implementations. As a result, FP8 behaves more like a quantization format than a standard numeric representation. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of FP8 computation and acceleration on two AI accelerators: the NVIDIA H100 and Intel Gaudi 2. Our findings highlight that the Gaudi 2, by leveraging FP8, achieves higher throughput-to-power efficiency during LLM inference, offering valuable insights into the practical implications of FP8 adoption for datacenter-scale LLM serving.

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