Equation 29 · Part 4 · Locality Is the Whole Game: The Memory Hierarchy and What a Kernel Does Not Read
Symbol N^2
What this part means
The square of N: multiply N by itself.
Its job in the formula
is squared: multiply the underlying quantity by itself. The square is a mathematical operation, not a second independent variable.
Full expression→Symbol N^2→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
…the forward pass so that attention can be recomputed on-chip, which the authors state is faster than reading the stored intermediate back from HBM. Their analysis gives O( ) HBM accesses against for standard attention, with a matching lower bound showing no exact algorithm can do asymptotically better across all SRAM sizes [ 1 ] . The reported results were a 7.6 times speedup on the attention computation itself for GPT-2, 15 per cent faster end-to-end BERT-large training against the…
Learn the underlying idea
An exponent tells how a base is used in multiplication. In x³, x is the base and 3 is the exponent: x³ = x × x × x.
Open the illustrated exponents: repeated multiplication and powers 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.