mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Bare-Metal Tensor Virtualization: Overcoming the Memory Wall in Edge-AI Inference on ARM64

arXiv 2601.03324 ↗First posted 6 Jan 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.ARcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is fundamentally constrained by the "Memory Wall" the bottleneck where data movement latency outstrips arithmetic throughput. Standard inference runtimes often incur significant overhead through high-level abstractions, dynamic dispatch, and unaligned memory access patterns. In this work, we present a novel "Virtual Tensor Core" architecture implemented in software, optimized specifically for ARM64 microarchitectures (Apple Silicon). By bypassing standard library containers in favor of direct memory mapping (mmap) and implementing hand-tuned NEON SIMD kernels, we achieve a form of "Software-Defined Direct Memory Access (DMA)." Our proposed Tensor Virtualization Layout (TVL) guarantees 100% cache line utilization for weight matrices, while our zero-copy loader eliminates initialization latency. Experimental results on a 110M parameter model demonstrate a stable throughput of >60 tokens/second on M2 hardware. While proprietary hardware accelerators (e.g., Apple AMX) can achieve higher peak throughput, our architecture provides a fully open, portable, and deterministic reference implementation for studying the memory bottleneck on general-purpose ARM silicon, meeting the 200ms psycholinguistic latency threshold without opaque dependencies.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 6 of its 19 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2026.

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References · 6

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 13,028
  3. 2021RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embeddingcited by 4,703
  4. 2020GLU Variants Improve Transformercited by 1,804
  5. 2019Root Mean Square Layer Normalizationcited by 1,480
  6. 2022LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scalecited by 906

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