{"ID":2844200,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07665","arxiv_id":"2511.07665","title":"FractalCloud: A Fractal-Inspired Architecture for Efficient Large-Scale Point Cloud Processing","abstract":"Three-dimensional (3D) point clouds are increasingly used in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and virtual reality (VR). Point-based neural networks (PNNs) have demonstrated strong performance in point cloud analysis, originally targeting small-scale inputs. However, as PNNs evolve to process large-scale point clouds with hundreds of thousands of points, all-to-all computation and global memory access in point cloud processing introduce substantial overhead, causing $O(n^2)$ computational complexity and memory traffic where n is the number of points}. Existing accelerators, primarily optimized for small-scale workloads, overlook this challenge and scale poorly due to inefficient partitioning and non-parallel architectures. To address these issues, we propose FractalCloud, a fractal-inspired hardware architecture for efficient large-scale 3D point cloud processing. FractalCloud introduces two key optimizations: (1) a co-designed Fractal method for shape-aware and hardware-friendly partitioning, and (2) block-parallel point operations that decompose and parallelize all point operations. A dedicated hardware design with on-chip fractal and flexible parallelism further enables fully parallel processing within limited memory resources. Implemented in 28 nm technology as a chip layout with a core area of 1.5 $mm^2$, FractalCloud achieves 21.7x speedup and 27x energy reduction over state-of-the-art accelerators while maintaining network accuracy, demonstrating its scalability and efficiency for PNN inference.","short_abstract":"Three-dimensional (3D) point clouds are increasingly used in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and virtual reality (VR). Point-based neural networks (PNNs) have demonstrated strong performance in point cloud analysis, originally targeting small-scale inputs. However, as PNNs evolve to process large-sca...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07665","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07665v2","authors":"[\"Yuzhe Fu\",\"Changchun Zhou\",\"Hancheng Ye\",\"Bowen Duan\",\"Qiyu Huang\",\"Chiyue Wei\",\"Cong Guo\",\"Hai \\\"Helen'' Li\",\"Yiran Chen\"]","published":"2025-11-10T22:19:37Z","proceeding":"cs.AR","tasks":"[\"cs.AR\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}