Equation 9 · The Real Economics of Shipping a Model to a Device
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the fixed, per-release engineering and QA cost of producing and validating the device-tier variant matrix described above — the harness time, the pass/fail sign-off per tier, per quantization scheme, per chip target. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
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Symbol C_dev
the fixed, per-release engineering and QA cost of producing and validating the device-tier variant matrix described above — the harness time, the pass/fail sign-off per tier, per quantization scheme, per chip target.
subscript
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.
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What the article says around this equation
Define as the fixed, per-release engineering and QA cost of producing and validating the device-tier variant matrix described above — the harness time, the pass/fail sign-off per tier, per quantization scheme, per chip target. Define U as the cost of distributing model updates to the installed fleet, expanded in the next section. Define as the marginal cost of one additional on-device inference and as the marginal cost of one additional cloud-served inference of the same model. Total cost over Q queries under each placement is
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