H2EAL: Hybrid-Bonding Architecture with Hybrid Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in a wide range of natural language processing applications. However, the high energy and latency overhead induced by the KV cache limits the edge deployment, especially for long contexts. Emerging hybrid bonding (HB) technology has been proposed as a promising alternative to conventional near-memory processing (NMP) architectures, offering improved bandwidth efficiency and lower power consumption while exhibiting characteristics of distributed memory.In this paper, we propose H2EAL, an HB-based accelerator with sparse attention algorithm-hardware co-design for efficient LLM inference at the edge. At the algorithm level, we propose a hybrid sparse attention scheme with static and dynamic sparsity for different heads to fully leverage the sparsity with high accuracy. At the hardware level, we co-design the hardware to support hybrid sparse attention and propose memory-compute co-placement to address the distributed memory bottleneck. Since different attention heads exhibit different sparse patterns and the attention structure often mismatches the HB architecture, we further develop a load-balancing scheduler with parallel tiled attention to address workload imbalance and optimize the mapping strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate H2EAL achieves 5.20 ∼ 48.21× speedup and 6.22 ∼ 73.48× energy efficiency improvement over baseline HB implementation, with a negligible average accuracy drop of 0.87% on multiple benchmarks.