A new technical paper titled “Analog in-memory computing attention mechanism for fast and energy-efficient large language models” was published by researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen.
Abstract
“Transformer networks, driven by self-attention, are central to large language models. In generative transformers, self-attention uses cache memory to store token projections, avoiding recomputation at each time step. However, graphics processing unit (GPU)-stored projections must be loaded into static random-access memory for each new generation step, causing latency and energy bottlenecks. Here we present a custom self-attention in-memory computing architecture based on emerging charge-based memories called gain cells, which can be efficiently written to store new tokens during sequence generation and enable parallel analog dot-product computation required for self-attention. However, the analog gain-cell circuits introduce non-idealities and constraints preventing the direct mapping of pre-trained models. To circumvent this problem, we design an initialization algorithm achieving text-processing performance comparable to GPT-2 without training from scratch. Our architecture reduces attention latency and energy consumption by up to two and four orders of magnitude, respectively, compared with GPUs, marking a substantial step toward ultrafast, low-power generative transformers.”
Find the technical paper here. September 2025.
Leroux, N., Manea, PP., Sudarshan, C. et al. Analog in-memory computing attention mechanism for fast and energy-efficient large language models. Nat Comput Sci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00854-1
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