Programming AMD XDNA NPUs with Open-source Compiler Tools: A FlashAttention Case Study
Spatial NPUs such as AMD XDNA place compute tiles beside small local memories and leave data movement between them to software. Mapping a multi-stage workload onto such a device is largely a question of where the intermediate tensors live. We report what we learned making those choices for FlashAttention with the open-source IRON and MLIR-AIR flows. We compare four reference designs on XDNA 1 and XDNA 2: one runs each operator separately, two stream between operators on chip, and one fuses all three attention stages into a single kernel. The fused kernel holds the $\boldsymbol{QK}^{\mathsf T}$ scores in compute-tile local memory and reduces partial results over the cascade interconnect, s...
| Authors | Erwei Wang, Ephrem Wu, Victor J. B. Jung et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AR |
| Published | 18 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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