Reading the device profile of the first export showed a fifth of every
sliding layer went nowhere useful: Output 9.9%, its quantise conversion
3.1%, and the window Slice 7.4%. The layer took a 512-entry window in,
appended the new key, sliced the oldest off and handed the whole recomputed
window back out -- 21 of 28 layers paying to move a cache-sized tensor
across the graph boundary once per token. Full layers paid a similar 9.5%
concatenating the new key onto the cache.
Both are the same mistake, and both go away by joining in score space
instead of key space: score the cache and the new token separately, then
concatenate two vectors of length n and 1 rather than an n x 256 key matrix.
Nothing cache-sized is copied, and each layer returns just the new K/V entry
for the runtime to drop into its ring slot. Softmax over keys does not care
what order the slots are in and each cached key already carries its own
rotary phase, so a ring buffer needs no reordering -- only a mask for slots
not yet written. The sliding cache correspondingly holds window-1 entries,
since a 512-token window counts the current token (transformers' own sliding
cache holds 511 for the same reason).
Measured on a real Galaxy S25, fp16, ms per layer:
sliding 1.689 -> 1.483 (-12.2%)
full 1.559 -> 1.567 (unchanged: the concat saved is spent on the
extra score matmul)
Two shapes had to be written as matmuls rather than the obvious elementwise
forms -- the new token's score (broadcast multiply + ReduceSum) and its
value contribution (a two-axis broadcast multiply). Both compile at fp16 and
both make QNN's context-binary converter exit 14 under w4a16; as matmuls
they compile and are the cheaper op on HTP anyway.
Also adds a selectable GELU approximation, and the measurement that closes
the question: erf GELU is 11-13% of every layer, but tanh is *slower* on
this NPU (1.535 vs 1.483 ms) despite holding 65.2 dB. The exact form stays,
which is also the better-fidelity choice.
Parity against the reference implementation is 136.8 dB with identical
top-1/top-5, and a test pins ring and roll to the same output on a shared
history so the device numbers cannot silently measure a different model.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01L1ax5wYLA6XbqEL1i8L9gZ
