Equation 12 · Serving a Frontier Model: The KV Cache, Batching, and What a Token Actually Costs
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Symbol b
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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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