amx VS GPTQ-for-LLaMa

I am talking about the matrix/vector coprocessor (AMX). You can find some reverse-engineered documentation here: https://github.com/corsix/amx

On M3 a singe matrix block can achieve ~ 1TFLOP on DGEMM, I assume it will be closer to 4TFLOPS for SGEMM. The Max variants have two such blocks. Didn't do precise benchmarking myself, but switching Python/R matrix libraries to use Apple's BLAS result in 5-6x perf improvement on matrix heavy code for me.

It's really cool. I hope it becomes more common for training/inference/numerics capable accelerators to be included in consumer hardware.

Apple's AMX is really under-documented, while the instructions were reverse engineered, Virtually no benchmarks are available comparing current chip generations, models and variants.

https://github.com/corsix/amx

Visible in the unofficial documentation for AMX instructions too - M2 only bf16 functionality - https://github.com/corsix/amx/blob/main/matfp.md

Confusingly there are 2 mechanisms to do matrix operations on the new apple hardware - AMX (https://github.com/corsix/amx) - and the ANE (apple neural engine) - which is enabled by CoreML. This code does not run on the neural engine but the author has a branch for his whisper.cpp project which uses it here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/pull/566 - so it may not be long before we see it applied here as well. All of this is to say that it actually could get significantly faster if some of this work was able to be handed to the ANE with CoreML.

really? seems pretty well documented here: https://github.com/corsix/amx

Article is almost two years old, and has a huge correction at the bottom. It's just a proprietary ISA extension, there's even a repo documenting what's been reverse engineered.

You are correct, in that those are the four

My understanding is that the AMX is more tightly wound with the CPU, ultimately being accessible via an instruction set (https://github.com/corsix/amx), and it is useful if you need to do matrix multiplications interleaved with other CPU tasks. A common example would be a VIO loop or something where you want that data in the CPU caches.

The GPU and Neural Engine are not that – they take some time to set up and initialize. They also can parallelize tasks to a much higher degree. The GPU is more generalizable, because you can write compute shaders to do anything in parallel, but it uses a lot of resources. I'll have to check out the PR to see how exactly the MPS shaders match up with the task at hand, because you could also consider writing Metal compute shaders by hand.

I know the least about the ANE, but it has specific hardware for running ML models, and you have to process the weights ahead of time to make sure they are in the right format. It can run ML models very efficiently and is the most battery friendly.

If someone were to build a Linux system with proprietary ISA extensions, how would they do it given Linux is open source? Are there any examples of this being done? Would it be possible at all?

I got inspiration from this (https://github.com/corsix/amx) and I wondered if someone has done it before on a Linux-based system. I understand a userspace library could be created to access those instructions from userspace, but how would then they be implemented in the kernel? Through a proprietary kernel module built using a custom compiler? Or is that not needed at all and the library could just run on the processor taking advantage of the proprietary extensions?

First I want to make it clear this is not a self promotion post. I hope many machine learning people come at me with questions or comments about this project. A little background about myself. I did work on the 4 bits quantization of LLaMA using GPTQ. (https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa). I've been studying AI in-depth for many years now.

Deploying the 60B version is a challenge though and you might need to apply 4-bit quantization with something like https://github.com/PanQiWei/AutoGPTQ or https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa . Then you can improve the inference speed by using https://github.com/turboderp/exllama .

If you prefer to use an "instruct" model à la ChatGPT (i.e. that does not need few-shot learning to output good results) you can use something like this: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Wizard-Vicuna-30B-Uncensored...

I use gptq-for-llama - from this https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa and Pygmalion 7B.

exllama is an optimized implementation of GPTQ-for-LLaMa, allowing you to run 4-bit quantized language models with GPU at great speeds.

With a single NVIDIA 3090 and the fastest inference branch of GPTQ-for-LLAMA https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa/tree/fastest-i..., I get a healthy 10-15 tokens per second on the 30B models. IMO GGML is great (And I totally use it) but it's still not as fast as running the models on GPU for now.

And exactly what Triton version are they comparing against? I just tried the latest version of this, and on my 4090/12900K I get 77 tokens per second for Llama 7B-128g. My own GPTQ CUDA implementation gets 151 tokens/second on the same model, same hardware. That makes it 96% faster, whereas AWQ is only 79% faster. For 30B-128g I'm currently only getting a 110% speedup over Triton compared to their 178%, but it still seems a little disingenuous to compare against their own CUDA implementation only, when they're trying to present the quantization method as being faster for inference.

Thanks for the explanation. I think some repos, like text generation webui used gptq for llama (I don't know if it's this repo or another one), anyway most repo that I saw use external things (like gptq for llama)

cd ../.. git clone https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa.git -b triton cd GPTQ-for-LLaMa pip install -r requirements.txt mkdir -p ../text-generation-webui/repositories ln -s ../../GPTQ-for-LLaMa ../text-generation-webui/repositories/GPTQ-for-LLaMa

cd repositories git clone https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa pip install -r requirements.txt

# To use the GPTQ models I need to Install GPTQ-for-LLaMa and the monkey patch mkdir repositories cd repositories git clone https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa.git -b triton cd GPTQ-for-LLaMa pip install ninja pip install -r requirements.txt cd cd text-generation-webui # download random model python download-model.py xxx/yyy # try to start the gui python server.py # It returns this warning but it runs bin /home/gm/miniconda3/envs/chat/lib/python3.10/site-packages/bitsandbytes/libbitsandbytes_cpu.so /home/gm/miniconda3/envs/chat/lib/python3.10/site-packages/bitsandbytes/cextension.py:34: UserWarning: The installed version of bitsandbytes was compiled without GPU support. 8-bit optimizers, 8-bit multiplication, and GPU quantization are unavailable. warn("The installed version of bitsandbytes was compiled without GPU support. " /home/gm/miniconda3/envs/chat/lib/python3.10/site-packages/bitsandbytes/libbitsandbytes_cpu.so: undefined symbol: cadam32bit_grad_fp32