KernelGenBench: A Multi-Source and Multi-Chip Benchmark for LLM-based Kernel Generation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly increased the demand for efficient accelerator kernels, but kernel development remains a highly specialized and labor-intensive task. The recent rise of LLMs and agentic frameworks offers a promising pathway toward automatic kernel generation. However, despite rapid progress, there is still no comprehensive benchmark to rigorously evaluate LLM-generated kernels across diverse operator sources or heterogeneous hardware platforms. We present KernelGenBench, a unified benchmark for systematically evaluating LLM- and agent-generated Triton kernels across diverse operator sources and heterogeneous hardware platforms. It comprises two complementary sub-benchmarks: KernelGenBench-MS (Multi-Source), evaluating 210 operators from three sources beyond standard PyTorch-centric tasks, and KernelGenBench-MC (Multi-Chip), measuring performance portability across six heterogeneous hardware platforms using a 110-operator subset. Our large-scale evaluation, consuming over 15 billion tokens, shows: (1) agent-based methods consistently outperform pure LLM sampling methods, while cuBLAS operators are the most challenging across all methods; (2) generation performance varies significantly across hardware platforms, with even recent kernel-specialized agents experiencing severe cross-platform degradation (e.g., AutoKernel drops from 87% on NVIDIA to 25% on Platform E); (3) autonomous kernel generation remains highly cost-intensive, with specialized agent methods averaging 5.11 million tokens per successful operator (AKO4all reaches 5.19 million), orders of magnitude higher than simple LLM sampling approaches.