mbarrett97 commented on issue #4771: [Relay] Added Merge Composite pass URL: https://github.com/apache/incubator-tvm/pull/4771#issuecomment-579448339 It's important to emphasise the difference between partitioned subgraphs (which correspond to 'External' functions), and the merged patterns here (which correspond to 'Composite' functions). Composite functions are a way to group together relay patterns which correspond to a particular external codegen function (eg. qnn_conv2d + bias_add + requantize maps to a single convolution function in Arm Compute Library). External functions are a way to represent a subgraph that should not go via TVM codegen but should instead go through an external compiler (eg. DNNL). For libraries like ACL or DNNL, it happens to be the case that you can just put every supported operator/composite function in it's own external function (partitioned subgraph) and because the library calls are standalone that works well enough. A more complex external compiler though may want to do some advanced fusion or manipulation which means it needs to see the full supported subgraph, not just a single operator/composite function at a time. It will produce some binary artifact that computes the entire subgraph rather than a particular operator within it. All that complexity should be handled by the external compiler's codegen pass, the responsibility of the partitioner is to ensure that pass receives a valid subgraph that is as large as possible while still being fully supported and introducing no dataflow problems. In summary, I don't think this pass replaces partitioning which is essential for the 'complex compiler' case, but I think it may replace the annotation pass.
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