The cambrian explosion of mixed-precision matrix multiplication for quantized deep learning inference
Hèctor Martínez, Adrián Castelló, Francisco D. Igual, Enrique S. Quintana–Ort́ı · Future Generation Computer Systems · 2025
Recent advances in deep learning (DL) have promoted to a shift from traditional 64-bit floating point (FP64) arithmetic for scientific computing toward reduced-precision formats–such as FP16, BF16, or even 8-bit integers–combined with mixed-precision arithmetic. This transition enhances computational throughput, reduces memory and bandwidth usage, and improves energy efficiency, offering significant advantages for resource-constrained edge devices. To support this shift, hardware architectures have evolved accordingly, now including adapted ISAs (Instruction Set Architectures) that expose mixed-precision vector units and matrix engines tailored for DL workloads. At the heart of many DL and scientific computing tasks is the general matrix-matrix multiplication ( GEMM ), a fundamental kernel historically optimized using fused multiply-add (FMA) vector instructions on SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) units. However, as hardware moves toward mixed-precision dot (or inner)-product-centric operations optimized for quantized inference, these legacy approaches are being phased out. In response to this, our paper revisits the conventional, high-performance implementation of GEMM and describes strategies for adapting it to mixed integer precision (MIP) arithmetic across modern ISAs, including x86_64, Arm, and RISC-V. Concretely, we illustrate novel micro-kernel designs and data layouts that better exploit today’s specialized hardware and demonstrate significant performance gains from MIP arithmetic over floating-point implementations across three representative CPUs. These contributions highlight a new era of GEMM optimization-driven by the demands of DL inference on heterogeneous architectures, marking what we term as the “Cambrian period” for matrix multiplication.