LLM impose significant computational and memory demands, creating challenges for energy-efficient inference across platforms ranging from data centers to power-constrained edge devices. Weight precision plays a critical role in balancing inference accuracy, throughput, and energy consumption, while modern LLM workloads exhibit pronounced heterogeneity and tolerance that favors adaptive precision execution. This paper presents CIMERA, a reconfigurable-precision LLM inference accelerator that integrates compute-in-interconnect and memory to mitigate the memory wall and enable precision-aware execution. Compared to Nvidia H100, CIMERA delivers up to $25\times$ and $10\times$ higher energy efficiency for 1B and 13B models, respectively.
LLM inference has become an essential service, yet it imposes unprecedented demands on memory bandwidth, computational density, and communication efficiency. While IMC is a promising solution to the memory wall issue, the heterogeneous data dynamicity of LLM requires complementary resources to handle intermediate data generated during run-time. Furthermore, the massive number of parameters in LLM necessitates scale-up architectures where on-chip data movement is often the primary performance bottleneck. This article presents a hardware-software co-design framework that unifies distributed compute, memory, and communication into a seamless processing-communication fabric. On the hardware side, we propose a scalable architecture, named LEAP, that integrates IMC PE, NMC PE, and INC. This allows each hardware layer to execute specialized tasks: IMC for static weights, NMC for dynamic data, and INC for partial result reduction. On the software side, we introduce a partitioning, mapping, and scheduling framework optimized for key metrics in LLM serving, including throughput and latency. To address the distinct computational intensities of the prefill and decode phases, we present a prefill-decode disaggregation approach that dynamically reconfigures PE organizations to maximize resource utilization. Compared to commercial GPU platforms, the proposed architecture provides a throughput and an energy efficiency improvement of $\geq{}1.52\times$ and $24.91\times$, respectively.
Evaluation using cycle-accurate hardware-software co-simulation demonstrates that CHIPSMORE effectively sustains high throughput across varying model sizes, context lengths, and batch sizes while maintaining favorable power scaling.
