InflexCZE 1ab7e5ad2d CUDA: fuse RMS_NORM + SCALE into one kernel (#29393)
- #28068 builds the GDN q/k l2norm as ggml_scale(ggml_rms_norm(x, eps/n), 1/sqrt(n)). This adds 2 SCALE nodes per GDN layer, 96 extra kernel launches per ubatch on Qwen3.8-27B (48 GDN layers).
- The extra kernels take no measurable GPU time, but each launch has a host/driver cost. It is small with plain batch processing and about 10x larger with draft-mtp speculative decoding.
- rms_norm_f32 gets a do_scale flag, the same pattern as do_multiply/do_add, so the fused path shares the kernel, the reduction and the launcher. It computes scale * (rsqrt(mean + eps) * x), which matches the unfused rms_norm + scale bit for bit, so #28068 numerics are kept.
- Fusion only fires when SCALE has no bias and the rms_norm output has a single consumer (ggml_can_fuse).
- Metal (#28948) and SYCL (#28931) already fuse the same pattern.

Measured on 2x GTX 1080 Ti (sm_61, PCIe 3.0 x16 + x4), i7-13700KF, Windows 11, driver 582.66, CUDA 12.9.
Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL, -ngl 99 -ts 53,47 -ot token_embd=CPU, master fee39dd92.

llama-bench -ub 128,512 -p 512,2048 -n 128 -r 5, tok/s:

  build           pp512@128  pp2048@128  pp2048@512  tg128
  master           367.7      419.1       385.4      12.90
  master + fix     372.6      420.6       388.6      12.98
                   +1.3%      +0.4%       +0.8%      +0.6%

llama-server cold prefill, -c 56000 -ub 128 -b 2048, draft-mtp n-max 3 p-min 0.5, mean of 2 rounds x 3 reps:

  build           pp 8000         pp 20000
  master          356.5           322.0
  master + fix    371.4 (+4.2%)   337.4 (+4.8%)

- Launches per ubatch go from 1032.9 + 841.7 back to 978.9 + 799.7 (CUDA0 + CUDA1), the b10828 count. The GPU op sum is unchanged.
- test-backend-ops RMS_NORM_SCALE, NORM_SCALE, RMS_NORM_MUL_ADD, RMS_NORM_MUL_ROPE, RMS_NORM, RMS_NORM_BACK, NORM, L2_NORM and SCALE all pass on both GPUs.
- Perplexity is identical to the unfused build: 3.2030 +/- 0.0559 at -c 2048, 16 chunks.
- Draft acceptance counts per request match the unfused build.

Assisted-by: Claude Opus 5.5
2026-09-25 08:22:43 +03:00
2026-09-24 22:44:05 +03:00
2026-09-24 08:29:41 -07:00
2026-06-12 15:53:26 +02:00
2026-02-02 08:38:55 +02:00
2026-09-09 15:56:27 +02:00

llama.cpp

llama

Quick start

A few options to get llama.cpp installed on your machine:

Once installed:

# Download and run a model directly from Hugging Face
llama cli -hf ggml-org/Qwen3.5-0.8B-GGUF

# Launch OpenAI-compatible API server
llama serve -hf ggml-org/Qwen3.5-0.8B-GGUF
VLM session with `llama cli` VLM session with llama cli Built-in web UI against `llama serve` running Qwen 3.6 Built-in web UI against llama serve

Description

The main goal of llama.cpp is to enable LLM (and VLM) inference with minimal setup and state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of hardware - locally and in the cloud.

  • Plain C/C++ implementation without any dependencies
  • Apple silicon is a first-class citizen - optimized via ARM NEON, Accelerate and Metal frameworks
  • AVX, AVX2, AVX512 and AMX support for x86 architectures
  • RVV, ZVFH, ZFH, ZICBOP and ZIHINTPAUSE support for RISC-V architectures
  • 1.5-bit, 2-bit, 3-bit, 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit, and 8-bit integer quantization for faster inference and reduced memory use
  • Custom CUDA kernels for running LLMs on NVIDIA GPUs (support for AMD GPUs via HIP and Moore Threads GPUs via MUSA)
  • Vulkan and SYCL backend support
  • CPU+GPU hybrid inference to partially accelerate models larger than the total VRAM capacity

The llama.cpp project is build on top of the ggml library.

Supported backends

Backend Target devices
BLAS All
BLIS All
CANN Ascend NPU
CUDA Nvidia GPU
HIP AMD GPU
Hexagon Snapdragon
IBM zDNN IBM Z & LinuxONE
MUSA Moore Threads GPU
Metal Apple Silicon
OpenCL Adreno GPU
OpenVINO [In Progress] Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs
RPC All
SYCL Intel GPU
VirtGPU VirtGPU APIR
Vulkan GPU
WebGPU All
ZenDNN AMD CPU

Documentation

Tools

Development

Contributing

  • Contributors can open PRs
  • Collaborators will be invited based on contributions
  • Maintainers can push to branches in the llama.cpp repo and merge PRs into the master branch
  • Any help with managing issues, PRs and projects is very appreciated!
  • Read the CONTRIBUTING.md for more information

Acknowledgements

  • yhirose/cpp-httplib - Single-header HTTP server, used by llama-server - MIT license
  • nothings/stb - Single-header image format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
  • nlohmann/json - Single-header JSON library, used by various tools/examples - MIT License
  • mackron/miniaudio - Single-header audio format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
  • sheredom/subprocess.h - Single-header process launching solution for C and C++ - Public domain
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