← All parts of this equation

Equation 12 · Part 7 · How AI Memory Systems and the Bandwidth Wall Actually Work

Symbol l

MKV  =  2 n h d e b l,M_{\mathrm{KV}} \;=\; 2 \, n \, h \, d \, e \, b \, l ,
ll

What this part means

l is an input to the expression that computes the quantity on the left.

Its job in the formula

l is an input to the expression that computes the quantity on the left.

The passage around this formula

…for very long contexts, state the resulting footprint precisely: for a model with n layers and h attention heads of dimension d , stored using e bytes per element, the KV cache size for batch size b and sequence length l is MKV  =  2 n h d e b lM_{\mathrm{KV}} \;=\; 2 \, n \, h \, d \, e \, b \, l . which grows linearly in both batch size and sequence length, with the leading factor of two accounting for storing both keys and values [ 9 ] . That single equation is the whole mechanism: nothing about it is a design choice an inference engineer can simply decline. Extend…

Read this part in the article →

Learn the underlying idea

A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

Open the illustrated variables: a letter stands for a value guide →

See this notation across published equations →

Sources cited in the surrounding passage

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.