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Hardware Mechanisms to Dynamically Throttle AI Performance (arxiv.org)
2 points by Jimmc414 74 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of software rules an AI could bypass or shutting the whole chip off, hardware controls on the GPU's memory slow an AI mid-run by shrinking its cache or adding delays. At one-eighth resources, performance fell by up to 80% with little added circuitry.

Abstract

As more capable AI models are increasingly integrated into critical computer systems, the lack of control over AI intent motivates safety mechanisms. Existing software safeguards impose only behavioral constraints that can potentially be bypassed by sufficiently intelligent models. While hardware-level safety enforcement has been recognized as an essential last line of defense, few mechanisms have been proposed beyond policy regulations on unauthorized accesses or coarse full-chip shutdown. What is missing is a fine-grained, dynamic intervention mechanism at the architecture level. In this paper, we introduce a set of microarchitecture knobs which dynamically control the available hardware resources to limit AI performance at runtime. We evaluate candidate knobs spanning the GPU memory subsystem, across capacity, bandwidth, latency and frequency dimensions, and narrow down to four strong candidates: L2 size, L2 latency, L2 bandwidth, and shared memory port access rate. To minimize new logic and extra design cost, we build all four mechanisms from well-established microarchitectural primitives: cache way masking, credit-based rate limiting, latency insertion, and bank arbitration. We show that these knobs achieve high performance sensitivity (up to 80% performance cut at 1/8 resource availability), negligible implementation cost (<~10K flip flops), fast stabilization after dynamic throttling (5-80K cycles), and minimal collateral impact on the rest of the chip. Further, multi-knob analysis reveals combinations of knobs that amplify the performance degradation beyond the effect of each knob individually, which enables a broader range of performance targets.

Haiyue Ma, Lauren Malek, Joseph Forzani, David Wentzlaff
arXiv:2607.18069 · cs.AR, cs.LG · submitted Jul 20, 2026
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