Files
composable_kernel/include/ck_tile
Aviral Goel 4aecc8de5b [rocm-libraries] ROCm/rocm-libraries#7442 (commit b7d57ef)
[CK] CompV4: remove redundant barrier (+5.7% gfx942, +1% gfx950) (#7442)

## Summary

- Remove one redundant `block_sync_lds()` from the pong phase of the
CompV4 GEMM pipeline hot loop
- The pong phase had 2 barriers while ping had 1 — the second pong
barrier (after LDS writes, before global loads) was unnecessary because
the sync at the top of the next ping iteration already ensures LDS
coherence
- Removing this barrier allows global loads to overlap with LDS write
drain, restoring the latency hiding the ping-pong design was built to
provide
- Abstracting away Ping Pong phases into generic lambda avoids making
such mistake again.

## Benchmark

### gfx942 (MI300X), 86 fp16 GEMM shapes

| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Improved (>1%) | **80** |
| Neutral (±1%) | **4** |
| Regressed | **2** |
| Average gain | **+5.7%** |
| Best gain | +18.0% (4096x256x16384) |
| Worst regression | -2.9% (12288x3072x4096) |

### gfx950 (MI355X), 86 fp16 GEMM shapes

| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Improved (>1%) | **32** |
| Neutral (±1%) | **54** |
| Regressed | **0** |
| Best gain | +9.0% (4096x2048x28672) |

### Top gains by workload

| Shape (MxNxK) | Source | gfx942 BL | gfx942 Opt | gfx942 Gain | gfx950
BL | gfx950 Opt | gfx950 Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4096x256x16384 | bloom_fc2 | 38.3 | 45.2 | **+18.0%** | 75.6 | 77.0 |
+1.9% |
| 4096x512x22016 | llama2_7b | 77.8 | 90.8 | **+16.7%** | 152.4 | 154.9
| +1.7% |
| 256x1536x7168 | deepseek | 14.4 | 16.7 | **+16.0%** | 27.2 | 28.0 |
+2.8% |
| 4096x1024x22016 | llama2_7b | 156.2 | 180.8 | **+15.7%** | 304.8 |
311.6 | +2.2% |
| 4096x1024x16384 | bloom_fc2 | 154.6 | 178.5 | **+15.4%** | 303.1 |
309.5 | +2.1% |
| 4096x4096x22016 | llama2_7b | 371.0 | 412.3 | **+11.1%** | 819.8 |
823.6 | +0.5% |
| 4096x2048x28672 | llama3_8b | 235.5 | 259.5 | **+10.2%** | 530.0 |
577.7 | **+9.0%** |
| 250880x256x4096 | bloom_logits | 289.0 | 335.9 | **+16.2%** | 595.5 |
599.1 | +0.6% |
| 8192x8192x8192 | square | 411.8 | 432.9 | **+5.1%** | 825.1 | 825.8 |
+0.1% |
| 7168x4096x8192 | llama70b | 362.9 | 374.7 | **+3.3%** | 775.8 | 782.5
| +0.9% |

## Hardware counter analysis (rocprof-compute, 8192x8192x8192, gfx942)

| Metric | Baseline | Optimized | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| s_barrier per ping+pong | 5 | 4 | **-1** |
| MFMA Utilization | 47.8% | 55.5% | **+7.7pp** |
| IPC | 0.17 | 0.21 | **+23.5%** |
| MFMA F16 % of peak | 30.6% | 33.5% | **+2.8pp** |
| VALU (instructions) | 41.67M | 41.67M | identical |
| MFMA (instructions) | 65.91M | 65.91M | identical |
| Spill/Stack Read | 8.27M | 8.27M | identical |

All instruction counts are identical — the optimization removed one
synchronization point, not any compute instructions.

## Correctness

- gfx942: GPU verification (`-v=2`) passed on 4 shapes (8192x8192x8192,
4096x4096x4096, 22016x4096x4096, 4096x512x28672)
- gfx950: GPU verification (`-v=2`) passed on all 86 shapes
2026-05-27 12:23:43 -04:00
..
2024-12-12 11:54:03 +08:00

Back to the main page

Composable Kernel Tile

concept

ck_tile provides a programming model with templated abstractions to enable users to implement performance-critical kernels for machine learning workloads. introduces following basic concepts to help users building your own operator

  • tensor coordinate transformation, this is the core concept of layout/index transform abstraction in both compiler time and run time.
  • tile-based programming model, including tile-level api and the concept of distributed tensor.

ck_tile is independently from the old ck, located under /include/ck_tile. You don't need to include anything from old CK, ck_tile has similiar (indeed almost the same) implementations for users to build operators. We will have a transition period to pull everything from old ck into ck_tile, stay tuned.

component

ck_tile is splitted into several componenets including core, host, ops/gemm, ops/fmha... each component you only need to include a single header (e.g #include "ck_tile/core.hpp", #include "ck_tile/ops/fmha.hpp") then you are able to use the function/structure inside (different from old ck)

[core]
ck_tile/core contains all the basic data structure and function to build the kernel, you can only include this header and build your own operators that utilizing all the basic building blocks introduced in ck.

core/container

  • array, store runtime variables with fixed length (tensor index, register buffer, etc...)
  • tuple, same as std::tuple, hold different type of data, and one of the solution to achieve multiple buffer.
  • sequence, compile time integer sequence used to build various internal structures, or to describe tile size
  • other convenient structure build on top of above 3

core/numeric

  • gpu data type like fp16_t, bf16_t, fp8_t... and the conversion between each other
  • constexpr integer similiar to std::integral_constant to be used as compile time integer.
  • math functions and numeric utilities

core/algorithm

  • coordinate transformation system, used to build tensor transform and compile time indexing. This is the core idea introduced in old ck to describe how a tensor is build by several basic transform primitives like merge/unmerge/embed etc... and how we indexing into a ND tensor that finally mapped to 1D memory offset.

core/tensor

  • tensor descriptor, to describe how a ND tensor
  • distributed tensor, describe the storage of this tensor, and the distribution of how a collection of threads collaborately work for this tensor.
  • tile level API, including load_tile, store_tile, shuffle_tile, slice_tile, etc...

[host]
ck_tile/host contains all the host side utilities to launch a kernel, create the device buffer, and some reference implementations. This can be used to create examples (like that under ck_tile example folder) and simple executable to invoke this kernel, so if you only need ck_tile to build your own device library then it's OK to not include this. Based on this, it is recommended to include the specific header you needed under this folder to avoid including unwanted headers (e.g, only include ck_tile/host/kernel_launch.hpp), unless you are writing a host executable.

[ops/gemm, ops/fmha, ops/reduce...]
our implementation of different device operators.

  • warp, warp tile level operator
  • block, block tile level operator
  • pipeline, pipeline that can achieve a customized tile level mainloop (or epilogue). By switching different pipeline to the kernel template you can have different kind of pipeline optimizations.
  • kernel, template interface for users to instantiate a particular kernel

[ops/epilogue]
epilogue part of our kernel. We may extend this epilogue part to let users to build their own cutomized epilogues.

[ref]
reference implementation of cpu or gpu. This folder is supposed to include a specific header on demand.

examples

currently we put all ck_tile related example under /example/ck_tile folder. Please check each example's subfolder.