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Modal Blog· Charles Frye·· 2026-06-11AI score34

Modal Makes FlashAttention-4 Faster for LLM Inference

Making FlashAttention-4 faster for inference

AI summary

Modal contributed optimizations to the FlashAttention-4 kernel to speed up decode-heavy LLM inference workloads, where memory bandwidth is the bottleneck. The changes include porting the "split KV" parallelism technique to FA4 and replacing TMA cp.async.bulk loads with cp.async for irregular memory accesses. An FP8 input PR (merged April 17, 2026) delivers up to 1.16x throughput over the bf16 baseline and enables smaller KV caches.

Source:Modal Blog · modal.com