Equation 1 · Part 9 · Serving a Frontier Model: The KV Cache, Batching, and What a Token Actually Costs
subscript
subscript
What this part means
The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.
Its job in the formula
A subscript distinguishes a version, component, step, or member of a quantity. It does not automatically mean multiplication.
Full expression→subscript→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
A transformer decoder generates autoregressively: each new token attends over all previous positions [ 1 ] . To avoid recomputing the whole prefix at every step, implementations retain the per-layer key and value tensors for every past position. That is the key–value cache, and its size grows linearly with sequence length: . for L layers, key–value heads, head dimension , sequence length s , batch size b , and p bytes per element. The factor of two counts keys and values.
Learn the underlying idea
A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.
Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.