Equation 13 · Part 8 · Serving a Frontier Model: The KV Cache, Batching, and What a Token Actually Costs
subtraction
subtraction
What this part means
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Its job in the formula
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Full expression→subtraction→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
What binds is memory, and specifically the cache. Weights are shared across the batch; the key–value cache is not. Each concurrent request carries its own, and each grows with every token it generates. Achievable batch size is therefore . which falls as contexts lengthen. This is the mechanism behind an effect users notice without explanation: long-context workloads cost disproportionately more, because they crowd out the concurrency that made short-context serving cheap.
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
Open the illustrated addition and subtraction in an equation guide →
Sources cited in the article section
- [2] Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference ↗
- [3] Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.