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The Anatomy of a Triton Attention Kernel (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule 302 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They built the attention step that lets an AI model read stored text in one portable code language, so it runs fast on NVIDIA and AMD chips without hand-tuning. With tuning and server integration it reached 105.9% of the best hand-written version, up from 19.7%.

Abstract

A long-standing goal in both industry and academia is to develop an LLM inference platform that is portable across hardware architectures, eliminates the need for low-level hand-tuning, and still delivers best-in-class efficiency. In this work, we demonstrate that portable, efficient cross-platform LLM inference is indeed possible and share our experience. We develop a state-of-the-art paged attention kernel, the core performance-critical component of many LLM deployments, that builds exclusively on the domain-specific just-in-time compiled language Triton to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. We describe our high-level approach, the key algorithmic and system-level improvements, the parameter auto-tuning required to unlock efficiency, and the integrations into a popular inference server that are necessary to bring the performance of a generic Triton attention kernel from 19.7% of the state-of-the-art to 105.9%. Our results highlight how open-source domain-specific languages can be leveraged to unlock model portability across different GPU vendors.

Burkhard Ringlein, Jan van Lunteren, Radu Stoica, Thomas Parnell
arXiv:2511.11581 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.DC, cs.PL · submitted Oct 7, 2025
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