Salca: A Sparsity-Aware Hardware Accelerator for Efficient Long-Context Attention Decoding
Long contexts improve capabilities of large language models but pose serious hardware challenges: compute and memory footprints grow linearly with sequence length. Particularly, the decoding phase continuously accesses massive KV cache, dramatically increasing bandwidth and computing pressure. Existing accelerators are primarily designed and evaluated for short contexts. They suffer from significant performance degradation when processing long contexts. To bridge this gap, we identify the major bottleneck and present a hardware accelerator for long context attention decoding via hardware-software co-design. On the software side, we propose dual-compression dynamic sparse attention. It com...
| Authors | Wang Fan, Wei Cao, Xi Zha et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AR |
| Published | 27 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.