EdgeMM: Multi-Core CPU with Heterogeneous AI-Extension and Activation-aware Weight Pruning for Multimodal LLMs at Edge

Emerging multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) exhibit strong cross-modality perception and reasoning capabilities and hold great potential for various applications at edge. However, MLLMs typically consist of a compute-intensive modality encoder and a memory-bound LLM decoder, leading to distinct bottlenecks for hardware designs. In this work, we present a multi-core CPU solution with heterogeneous AI extensions, which are based on either the compute-centric systolic array or memory-centric digital compute-in-memory (CIM) coprocessors. In addition, dynamic activation-aware weight pruning and bandwidth management are developed to enhance bandwidth efficiency and core utilization, improving overall performance. We implemented our solution using commercial 22nm technology. For representative MLLMs, our evaluations show EdgeMM can achieve $2.84 \times$ performance speedup compared to laptop 3060 GPU.