Equation 2 · Serving a Frontier Model: The KV Cache, Batching, and What a Token Actually Costs
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
the number of layers. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
Read it piece by piece
How to interpret it
Read this expression with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
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.
Sources cited in the article section
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
Return to Serving a Frontier Model: The KV Cache, Batching, and What a Token Actually Costs