
AI Post Transformers
Memory-Bound, Not Bandwidth-Limited Batch-1 LLM Decode
This episode explores why batch-1 LLM decode for robots, edge copilots, and other single-session agents behaves very differently from high-throughput serving, and why next-token latency cannot be explained by memory bandwidth alone. It breaks down the paper’s main test: compare real decode time against an analytic memory floor based on model-weight and KV-cache traffic, then run that across Qwen-2.5-7B, Mistral-7B-v0.3, and Llama-3.1-8B on L4, L40S, A100, and H100 GPUs over contexts from 2048 to 16384. The discussion argues that because these models already use grouped-query attention to cut KV traffic, the remaining latency gap is dr...






