Equation 11 · Part 1 · Serving a Frontier Model: The KV Cache, Batching, and What a Token Actually Costs
Symbol b
What this part means
b is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Its job in the formula
b is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol b→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
If reading the weights dominates and the weights are read once per step regardless of how many requests are in flight, then serving b requests together costs barely more than serving one. Throughput rises almost linearly in b until something else binds. Pope and colleagues set out this partitioning analysis for large transformers and showed how latency, throughput, and cost trade against one another under different sharding strategies [ 2 ] .
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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.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
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