RoadBlock: Rethinking GPU Tensor Core Microarchitecture for Emerging Microscaling Format Support

Paper

Abstract

While multiple recent custom Microscaling (MX) format proposals preserve higher model quality over OCP MX, their hardware evaluations remain confined to standalone MAC-unit prototypes, ignoring the system-level integration overheads inside real GPU Tensor Cores. To this end, I present RoadBlock, an open-source framework for accurate end-to-end modeling of custom MX formats in a programmable Tensor Core, built on the RISC-V Vortex GPGPU. RoadBlock exposes data size, scale-factor size, and block size as configurable parameters and automatically derives per-thread metadata tiling for arbitrary formats, enabling format-specific Perplexity-PPA tradeoff evaluation before silicon commitment.

Source code available at https://github.com/vortexgpgpu/vortex/tree/roadblock