Skip to content

CK Tile FMHA/batch-prefill: support BF16/FP16 Q with FP8 KV for GQA decode #3744

Description

@ThomasNing

Request

Please add CK Tile FMHA / batch-prefill support for the serving-friendly mixed-dtype GQA attention contract:

  • Q: BF16 or FP16
  • K/V cache: FP8 E4M3, with descales
  • O: BF16 or FP16
  • GQA: arbitrary num_q_heads / num_kv_heads ratios, including 12
  • Head dim: 128
  • Decode-like use cases: q_len=1, paged/batch-prefill metadata, context length 1K+

Motivation

We are serving GLM-4.5-Air FP8 on AMD MI300X (gfx942) through SGLang/AITER. The model is non-MLA GQA:

  • num_attention_heads=96
  • num_key_value_heads=8
  • head_dim=128
  • GQA ratio: 12

The desired decode path is BF16/FP16 activation Q with FP8 KV cache. The model weights and KV cache are FP8, but the inter-layer activation / attention Q remains BF16 or FP16 in the serving stack. Quantizing Q to FP8 just to call attention adds extra overhead and an additional accuracy/perf tuning surface.

Current behavior observed

On MI300X (gfx942), AITER paged_attention_ragged supports this mixed contract:

  • BF16 Q/O
  • FP8 K/V cache
  • gqa_ratio=12
  • head_size=128
  • page/block size 1

It compiles a paged-attention specialization with kv_dtype=uint8_t and fp8_kv_dtype=fp8_e4m3.

CK Tile mha_batch_prefill_func currently supports the same GLM GQA shape if Q/K/V are all FP8. For example, a probe with batch 4, q_len=1, ctx=1024, num_q_heads=96, num_kv_heads=8, head_dim=128, all FP8 Q/K/V, BF16 output compiled:

mha_batch_prefill_fp8bf16_nlogits_nbias_nmask_nlse_ndropout_pertensor

The same probe with BF16 Q and FP8 K/V fails after compiling a BF16 query path:

mha_batch_prefill_bf16_nlogits_nbias_nmask_nlse_ndropout_nqscale
RuntimeError: query and key must have the same dtype

Desired support

Please support CK Tile FMHA / batch-prefill for:

  • BF16/FP16 Q with FP8 K/V
  • BF16/FP16 output
  • K/V descales
  • arbitrary GQA ratios such as 12
  • decode-style q_len=1 and paged/batch-prefill metadata

This would let AITER/SGLang use CK Tile for GLM-style FP8 KV cache decode without adding an explicit Q quantization path before attention.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions